With the increasing popularity of drones and short-form social media videos, almost everyone who is serious about photography is now also capturing video. If you’re an Adobe Lightroom (formerly Lightroom CC) user, until now that has meant using a tool other than Lightroom to work with them. Lightroom Classic has limited video editing capabilities, but the new features for the Cloud-centric version of Lightroom go well beyond those. While Adobe introduced a number of other enhancements to its Lightroom product offerings that we’ll get to in this article, the most significant is support for video editing.
We haven’t been able to test a pre-release version of the new Lightroom, so the below is based on Adobe-provided materials and demos. The product is available now, so we’ll be working with it and writing more about it over time.
Video Editing in Lightroom
Impressively, Adobe has not only made Lightroom’s photo editing tools available for videos, but has done it in a way that you can use the same controls and presets across both to achieve a consistent look for a project. Those of us who are primarily photographers but like to enhance our productions with some “B-Roll” taken from a drone or other interesting perspective will find that especially helpful. That same approach has also become very popular with wedding and event photographers — two of the major markets for Lightroom.
From a first look the editing features are impressive. From my perspective the cloud-first nature of the modern Lightroom may be a challenge for videographers, given the size of videos and the cost to store them online. At least for now, the new features aren’t available in Lightroom Classic, so Adobe is clearly hoping users will overlook those hurdles for the sake of a more-unified, cross-platform, video workflow.
Lightroom has also added an AI-powered mask group inversion tool, along with mask copy and paste.
More and Smarter Presets for Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and ACR Across All Platforms
While the video editing capability is unique to Lightroom, most of the other new features are, as is typical, available to users of Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop’s Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). Today’s release includes additional presets, a preset amount slider, and new Premium Preset packs. In particular, Adobe’s new “AI-powered” adaptive presets can target specific areas of an image. For example, the sky enhancement preset will attempt to select just the sky for its effects.
Adobe’s new Adaptive Presets use Adobe’s AI tech to limit their effects to the desired portion of a photo. The first two are for more dramatic skies and making the subject of a photo “pop.”
New Premium Preset packs include Black & White Portraits, Edge Portraits, Group Portraits, Concerts, and Video. Other new features in Lightroom for Mac and Windows include: AI-powered red-eye removal, a side-by-side photo comparison capability, and a Community search tool.
Forward/Back and Lightroom Storage Management
One handy navigation feature Adobe has added to Lightroom is a forward/back command. That should be especially useful to those on mobile devices.
Users of Lightroom will also get an improved set of tools to help manage the disk storage used locally by their images, as well as the ability to purge their local cache.
Price and Availability
Since all of these features are updates to subscription products they are available at no charge to anyone with the appropriate current license. The Windows and Mac updates to Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are available now, with the updates to Lightroom Mobile beginning to roll out today through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
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