Lightroom November 2015 Update – APPROVED!

APPROVED!

The Improve Photography team has now had a few days to poke at the Lightroom CC 2015.3/6.3 update provided by Adobe in early November 2015 and all of us have had a good experience with the update.  We recommend the update for all photographers.  We also recommend setting the Camera Raw cache to 70GB (Preferences->File Handling->Camera Raw Cache Settings) and disabling Graphics Processing (Preferences->Performance->Use Graphics Process UNCHECKED) in order to make things work the best they can.

Why Approved

Just to give you a little bit of insight into why it is we feel we can “approve” this release and recommend all photographers update to it, here is how it came about.  

First, we watch the user forums at adobe.com.  This is a really good indicator of how things are going because the forums get filled up with problem reports really quickly after a release.  The feedback of the changes in the CC 2015.2/6.2 where the import got changed was pretty well instantaneous and more broadly reported than any other issue that we have seen in at least 4 years of watching them.  There hasn't been a peep in those forums regarding any serious issues (although there has been one report of a user who can't get the slideshow function to work in 6.3 works fine in 6.0 and 6.1.1).

Second, and something we think is more important, the IP team has been running the update since it was released.  We have real-world, hands-on experience with the update.  We have used it on Mac (El Capitan and Yosemite) and PC (Windows 7 and Windows 8).  It has all gone well!  Should say it has gone well for Lightroom.

Make no mistake, we think that Adobe needs to continue down the path of improving the performance and stability of Lightroom, but for the first time in two updates Lightroom isn't getting in the way.  Not exactly praising things there are we?  Still, the ability to use Dehaze in a brush or filter being one of the best new features from CC2015.2/6.2 that we couldn't recommend is nice to have now that Adobe has made the software useable again with this update.

How To Update

It is probably easiest to get the update using the Creative Cloud application or by going through the Lightroom Help menu.  If you want the more direct approach, here are the direct links: Windows or Mac.

What about El Capitan / Windows 10?

While we are at updating our recommendations, we can also change the status of Mac OS X “El Capitan” and Microsoft Windows 10 both to CAUTION.  The issues being reported running Adobe products on both operating systems has slowed significantly.  In fact, some of the issues with El Capitan were addressed in this latest Lightroom release (tethering to a Nikon camera is still broken running Lightroom on El Capitan).  

If you have some time to do the upgrade, we can say that it should be pretty safe to do so now.  We have heard from a number of listeners and readers that their upgrade of both has gone really well.  We expect to be able to give both the APPROVED status pretty shortly.