Lightroom Classic 15.4 is out, and it brings changes that will affect how you mask, manage your catalog, and run AI denoising. If you've been frustrated by sloppy Select Subject masks or a catalog cluttered with duplicates, this update addresses both directly.
Coming to you from Mickey Pullen with Eastern Shore Photo Instruction, this detailed video walks through what Pullen considers the three most useful improvements in Lightroom Classic 15.4. The biggest one is Select Object, now at version 5, and the side-by-side comparisons Pullen shows between 15.3.1 and 15.4 are genuinely striking. On a simple tree shot, the older version missed entire limbs. Version 5 catches them. On portraits with curly or flyaway hair, the edges go from rough and blown out to clean and tight. Pullen runs through more than a dozen test images, including birds in flight, groups of people, boats, and banners, and the pattern holds across almost all of them.
The duplicate detection feature is the other addition that stands out. Once you enable it in catalog settings under the metadata tab, Lightroom scans your entire catalog and stacks any matching files it finds. Pullen ran it on a catalog of roughly 25,000 images and it finished in five to ten minutes. A catalog of around 250,000 images took close to an hour. When duplicates are flagged, you can right-click and remove them, with the option to either pull them from the catalog only or delete them from disk entirely. There are a few quirks to the interface that can catch you off guard, and Pullen covers those in the video.
The third improvement is a 50% reduction in denoising processing time, but it only applies to Apple silicon Macs. If you're running an Intel chip, whether Mac or PC, this speedup doesn't apply. Pullen mentions that on his M-series machine, images that used to take around 18 seconds now finish in roughly 7 to 9 seconds. He also makes a brief comparison to DxO PureRaw as his usual go-to for denoising, which gives you a sense of where Lightroom's built-in denoising stands relative to dedicated tools. The video also touches on how to update correctly, including how Lightroom handles the catalog upgrade automatically by zipping and saving your old catalog before making any changes, so there's no risk of losing your existing work.
Check out the video above for the full rundown from Pullen, including his tips on avoiding the interface gotchas in the new duplicate detection workflow.
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