Author Archives: Ian Lyons

Camera Raw | Late August 2026

  The latest updates to Camera Raw (18.6), Lightroom Classic (15.5.1) and Lightroom Desktop (9.5.1) have been released to customers via the Creative Cloud App.

Camera Raw 18.6 has a small number of customer-facing bug fixes, as well as three new features . More on these below and in this YouTube video by Brian Matiash of Adobe.

There are no new features or customer-facing bug fixes in Lightroom Classic or Desktop.

Glow [Camera Raw]

Glow brings a classic optical glow to your images, with soft diffusion, blooming highlights, and warm halation. Glow can be found in the Effects panel, and can be used as a Global edit or within a mask.

  • Expand Glow to pick a style and fine-tune it with additional sliders. In above screenshot I’ve selected ‘Diffusion’, but other options include ‘ Bloom’ and ‘Halation’. Hovering over these options with your mouse, etc produces a preview of the effect.
  • Diffusion, is similar to the popular Orton effect that some users apply with a blended Gaussian blur layer in Photoshop
  • Holding down the Alt/Option keys while adjusting Range, Spread, and Warmth sliders allows you to visualise their effect.

Trim [Camera Raw]

Trim allows you to remove unwanted areas from the image while keeping the areas of interest intact. You can crop into the part of the image you want to keep then press Trim. It will retain the cropped area while marking rest of the image transparent. Now you can move the crop again to final desired size and either:

  • Use Generate to fill that transparent pixels, or
  • Click on ‘Keep’, which will create a Filter with transparency baked in.

Generative Expand was originally intended to fill any transparent pixels beyond the boundary of the original image. With Trim Adobe has added a new tool that can be used to create the transparent and expandable pixels within the original image boundary.

Metadata Panel [Camera Raw]

A panel to display basis Exif and IPTC metadata has been added. The panel can be enabled by pressing on the ‘I’ button as shown in below screenshot.

Note that clicking on the GPS coordinates under ‘Location’ will display the image location in Google Maps

Camera Support [All Clients]

  • Details of current camera support can be found here

Lens Correction Support [All Clients]

  • Details of current lens support can be found here

Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & Desktop | August 2026

  The latest updates to Camera Raw (18.5), Lightroom Classic (15.5) and Lightroom Desktop (9.5) have been released to customers via the Creative Cloud App. These updates include new camera and lens support along with some new features. There are also bug fixes for all.

Generative Expand [Camera Raw and Lightroom Desktop]

Originally, Generative Expand was only available in Camera Raw and did not make use of any AI to generate the fill areas. With this latest update to Camera Raw and Lightroom Desktop there is an option to use AI based expand utilising Firefly.

Generative Expand is located in ‘Crop and Expand’ panel as shown in below screenshot from Lightroom Desktop.

In below example, you can see  in the original photo that  bottom of the frame has been clipped.

Again, in below example the crop boundary is extended so that is beyond the original photo edges — Firefly generates new pixel content to fill the expanded canvas. You can use it to fill transparent areas from Geometric corrections, reframe photos for social media aspect ratios, or recover subjects that were clipped at capture.

Before Generative Expand

After Generative Expand

Initially, you get 3 variations of the fill, but further variations can be generated, if necessary. The filled area is a maximum of 2000 pixels on longest side.

Flatten Edits [Camera Raw and Lightroom Desktop]

Flatten Edits is a new automatic behaviour introduced with Generative Expand. Camera Raw and Lightroom Desktop flattens edits twice: first, it bakes in any existing pixel work (like Remove spots or the Enhance features such as Denoise) before generating. This ensures that the AI fill correctly “sees” edits you’ve already made. This is especially important when you’ve removed something along an edge, like a distracting branch or building, and then expand that same edge. After you keep the result, it flattens again to lock in the generated fill as fixed pixels, so the expanded content never has to be regenerated when you reopen the photo. Flattened edits can’t be individually adjusted afterward, but you can view them in the AI Edit Status popup or undo them by reverting to an earlier snapshot or version.

Render to DNG [All Clients]

Render to DNG is a new option added to the Edit/Context menus. It generates a new file that is a snapshot of your current settings, rendered to TIFF and wrapped in a DNG. The result is not raw — all edits are completely baked in, including masking, lens profiles, Lens Blur, and everything else in the Edit stack. Unlike Flatten Edits, which only bakes Remove-and-upstream filters, Render to DNG bakes the entire Edit stack. Render to DNG is especially helpful for Generative Expand workflows, when you want to begin your expansion from existing crop bounds rather than the original frame. It is also useful when you need to apply Super Resolution to a photo that has already had Denoise applied.

Masking Refinement [Lightroom Classic and Desktop]

Originally, introduced in Camera Raw 18.4, the new Masking Refinement sliders in the Masking panel of Lightroom Classic and Desktop enable finer control over AI Masks (i.e. Subject, Sky, Landscape, People and Object). The Feather slider (0-100) softens the transition at the masks boundary, while Edge (-50 to +50) shifts the boundary inward or outward. The benefit of this approach is that it avoids the need to use the mask brush.

Crop Improvements [Lightroom Classic]

Fans of the History panel will be overjoyed to see that Rotate and Flip are now recorded as history steps.

In-App lrcat-data Recovery [Lightroom Classic]

Lightroom Classic now prompts the users to repair lrcat-data if it finds issues/corruption related to same. This database contains the file related data associated with many of the AI based features in Lightroom Classic. For example: Denoise, Super Resolution and the various remove options found in the Generative Remove panel.

Typically, the lrcat-data file becomes corrupt if it and other catalog components are stored on cloud based storage such as OneDrive, DropBox, etc.

Camera Tether Improvements [Lightroom Classic]

  • Lightroom Classic now supports PTP Tethered Capture Support for Canon Camera. Details of new tethered camera support added since the last release can be found here

New Camera Support [All Clients]

  • Details of new camera support added since the last release can be found here

New Lens Correction Support [All Clients]

  • Details of new lens support added since the last release can be found here

Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & Desktop | June 2026

  The latest updates to Camera Raw (18.4), Lightroom Classic (15.4) and Lightroom Desktop (9.4) have been released to customers via the Creative Cloud App. These updates include new camera and lens support along with some new features. There are also bug fixes for all.

Note that Lightroom Classic 15.4 will update the catalog when first launched. This update is required to provide support for new metadata filters and smart collections that I’ll discuss below.

Masking Improvements [All Clients]

The ‘Subject’ mask uses a new and much improved model. There is also a new warning dialog displayed when user updates the masks (when such photos needs an AI update on masking for the first time after update to new model).

The new Subject mask significantly improves the quality of the selection when compared to the previous model. In below example, notice that using the old model, sections of the sky are selected along with the tree whereas only the tree is selected by the new model.

 

Denoise [All Clients]

Camera Raw, Lightroom Classic & Desktop will now use the ‘Neural Engine’ on Apple Silicon to run Denoise on Bayer and X-Trans files. The use of the Apple Neural Engine significantly reduces the time needed to run Denoise.

Note that this feature enhancement Dows not apply to Intel based Macs or Windows based PCs.

Performance Improvements [Lightroom Classic & Desktop]

Lightroom Classic 15.4 includes some architectural changes to the ‘Brush’, which should result in more responsive brush strokes. Customers using tablets such as those by Wacom should also see some improvement in Brush behaviour.

Lightroom Desktop 9.4 benefits from speed improvements to batch editing along with Copy/Paste across photos. Previewing ‘Versions’ should also be much faster and more responsive.

Assisted Culling [Lightroom Classic & Desktop]

A new ‘Faces’ grid  is displayed in the Culling Info panel that allows you to check the ‘Eye Open/Sharpness’ score for individual faces in a group shot.

The Culling Info panel in Library and Import shows face thumbnails for each detected face. Clicking a thumbnail selects it and displays its individual scores.

The Loupe view now shows face bounding boxes on the image when Assisted Culling Panel is active. Boxes are colour-coded: green for passing faces, red for failing, white for neutral. Hovering over a face box shows a popup with per-face Eye Sharpness and Eyes Open scores.

 

Duplicate Detection [Lightroom Classic]

Lightroom Classic now includes the ability to detect duplicate photos within your catalog, individual folders or collections.

The duplicates are files where the pixel data is an exact match. Therefore, different file names, edits etc are ignored. By way of example, the screenshot shown below is for a catalog containing 2540 photos of which 3 have had duplicates detected by LrC 15.4. In each case the duplicate uses a different file name, and in one case a different edit (i.e. B&W and colour).

Clicking on any of photos opens a context menu that includes options to ‘Remove Duplicates’ or ‘Hide Duplicates’. My strong recommendation is that unless you know that a photo is an unintentional duplicate (i.e. has the same file name as the original and has no edits), then use the ‘Hide Duplicates’ option. Doing so ensures that intentional duplicates (i.e. different file names and has edits) remain safe within your catalog.

Sync Keywords to Cloud [Lightroom Classic]

You can now sync keywords to Lightroom web and other Lightroom clients. If an image with keywords is already synced, those keywords from Lightroom Classic and the cloud will sync when:

  • There is a metadata change; or
  • You select the Sync Keywords to Cloud option in the Keywording panel.
  • All keywords added to an image from version 15.4 onward are synced to the cloud—and changes made in the cloud are synced back to Lightroom Classic.

For above to work, a new preference located within the Lightroom Sync Preferences tab must be enabled.

Hierarchical keywords in Lightroom Classic (e.g., Nature > Mountain) are synced as individual tags (Nature, Mountain). That is, they will be displayed as flat keywords in Lightroom Desktop, mobile and web.

Lightroom Classic performs a bidirectional merge on first sync: Lightroom Classic keywords are pushed to cloud, and any existing cloud keywords are applied back to Lightroom Classic’s hierarchy.

The process of syncing keywords from Lightroom Desktop is slightly more complicated than above. Hopefully, Adobe will provide some guidance in the on-line Help documents.

AI Mask Filter and Smart Collections [Lightroom Classic]

You can now filter and organise photos in the library using the new AI-focused metadata filters.

Below is an example of the new Filters in use on Filter Bar:

A list  of the new filters is shown below. These are also available as smart collections.

AI Sharpen [Lightroom Desktop]

Lightroom Desktop now includes the ability to Sharpen using AI technology from Topaz. In my limited testing, the results range from little sharpening to extreme over sharpening. Other than ‘Default’ (i.e. minimal) and ‘Strong’ there is no way to control the amount of sharpening. So, be prepared for a lot of Trial and error. Unfortunately, this uses credits, even when the results are unacceptably bad.  Frankly, I’m not impressed by the results, and doubt many users will be either.

Custom Labels [Lightroom Desktop]

Lightroom Desktop now supports custom colour labels. This includes the ability to assign unique names to the labels. You can create up to 10 labels to match your personal workflow. Unfortunately, the labels still do not sync with. Lightroom iOS/Android or Classic.

Bidirectional Linear Gradients [Camera Raw]

Camera Raw 18.4 now includes a ‘Bidirectional Gradient’. Instead of fading to zero as in a normal gradient, the bidirectional. gradient enables you to fade the gradient in two different directions. It’s particularly useful in complex sky and horizon transitions.

Vectorscopes [Camera Raw]

Vectorscopes provide a precise visual representation of the hue and saturation for more accurate colour grading of your photos, especially for those more familiar with video.

Since I rarely capture video sequences I’ve no experience of using vectorscopes. So, see this linked video from Julieanne Kost for more details on vectorscopes and other new features in Camera Raw 18.4.

Interactive Histogram [Lightroom Desktop]

The interactive histogram in the Develop module has been a highly regarded feature in Lightroom Classic since 2012. It has also been been a popular feature request for Lightroom Desktop. At long last, the wait is finally over.

New Camera Support [All Clients]

  • Details of new camera support added since the last release can be found here

New Lens Correction Support [All Clients]

  • Details of new lens support added since the last release can be found here