Adobe has issued the first major update to Lightroom CC as part of it's massive 2015 update to Creative Cloud. The update adds a few new features, as well as support for some new cameras and a whole lot of bug fixes.

The new features are as follows:

Dehaze

Many outdoor scenes have some amount of haze due to atmospheric conditions. Dehaze is a new feature for removing/adding haze and fog from pictures.
The user can control how much haze to remove by adjusting a new slider in the Effects panel in the Dehaze section. This feature can also be used in the other direction to increase the amount of haze.
Recommended Workflow – Adjust the white balance of the image before applying the Dehaze control.

Here's a video demonstration of Dehaze in action:

Local White and Black Adjustment Sliders

Available with all 3 local adjustment tools: Gradient Filter, Radial Filter and Local adjustment brush
Useful for fine-tuning tonality near the brightest and darkest parts of the picture. For instance, they can be used to increase the contrast of highlights.
Recommended Workflow – Make your global adjustments first and then use the local adjustments to fine tune. Use the clip warning indicator to help avoid clipping highlights and shadows.

It should be noted that these new features are only available with the subscription version of Lightroom, i.e. Lightroom CC, and not the stand alone Lightroom 6.1. Apparently this is because of the infamous (and stupid) The Sarbanes-Oxley Act which prohibits software companies from adding new features to paid software releases. Adobe Engineering manager Steve Hoeng explains on the Adobe Forums (you'll need to be a member to view, ironically)

There is an interesting work around though. Stu Maschwitz over at ProLost has a way around the lack of Dehaze in 6.1.

Lightroom Mobile

Lightroom mobile on iOS also received some updates:

Video Support

Video support: You can now import, and sync your iPhone and iPad created videos from Lightroom on iOS to the web and desktop.

More adjustment tools

Vignettes
Adjust the Colour channel and B&W mix
Tone Curve

This is pretty great, because before, if you wanted to do a vignette, you needed to use one of the included presets.

Bug Fixes

There are a lot of bug fixes in this release. I'm particularly interested in the one about Improved X-Trans processing, but I'll cover that in a separate post soon. Here's the list of fixes according to the release notes:

Local adjustment brush did not properly use the pressure sensitivity information from a Wacom tablet (Windows)
Develop adjustments are lost after Edit In while auto-write XMP is turned on
Entering name with trailing space while face tagging changes case of keyword
Keyword hierarchies are not displayed when naming face regions
Keywords get erroneously renamed when using hierarchical keywords in face tagging
Keyboard shortcuts for Merge don’t work in German or French
Improved quality of display color management on some widegamut displays when Use Graphics Processor is enabled
Card reader not automatically found (Windows Autoplay registry issue)
Crash when Android device is mounted (Windows)
Closing the crop tool or cycling Full Screen modes with Lights Out mode makes entire screen go black
Cannot enter negative values in Develop in some languages
Mouse wheel changes brush size and scrolls image
Import from Photoshop Elements now allows you to include People keywords.
Reduced “color blur” artifacts when processing Fujifilm XTrans raw images – In collaboration with Fujifilm, we are still investigating methods to improve fine detail rendering and overall edge definition
If a Person keyword was NOT marked as “Include on Export”, it is still nevertheless included on export unless “Remove Person Info” is selected. Please note that this only occurred for People keywords.
The “Remove Chromatic Aberration” checkbox is now enabled by default for all Fujifilm cameras.
HDR and Pano Merge: Cleared in-camera crop before merging rather than destructively applying it prior to merging.
Pano Merge: Fixed a Pano blending issue specific to Leica M9.
Fixed a bug with Panasonic LX100 – extended ISO 100 was too bright and Magenta Highlights have been fixed.
Fixed a bug with Nikon Coolpix P7800 NRW raw files that showed only Matrix as camera profile.
Fixed crash when reading some JPEG images
When enabling “Before/After” preview in the Develop module, the screen flickered before showing the Before preview. This only occurred when GPU was enabled
Lightroom starts slowly, any attempt to do something results in the blue spinning-wheel and “Not Responding” when connect to LAN without LAN/internet connection
If a catalog is too large, the zipped backup can’t be unzipped
Export creates erroneous Invalid Constraint Size Error

I'll have some more details once I've played around with it a bit, and I'll have another post shortly looking at the X-Trans updates. Incidentally, there was a massive Photoshop update released today too, and I'll cover that soon too! It's going to be a busy day!