The New Lightroom is Making Things Even Easier

Today, Lightroom is getting some brand-new enhancements that are really making it super useful; and in my opinion, they’re rendering Photoshop almost useless. To clarify, Lightroom is getting it and not Lightroom Classic. Classic has had these in one way or another for a while. If you’re curious about the difference, we’ve got a whole article about it. These differences are very big, and also extremely powerful. Photographers using the program are going to be very pleased too as basically anything they need to do can be done now through Lightroom.

So here’s the list of big changes:

• Select People
• Select Objects
• Content-Aware Remove
• Adaptive Presets
• Edit While Compare

A lot of these are things that most photographers would boot up Photoshop for. But now, you don’t really have to. Of course, that also means that you need to work in Lightroom and I know photographers have strong feelings about that. The layout is totally different and not what I’d exactly call friendly if you’re so used to Lightroom Classic the way most serious photographers are. And while Capture One still does a better job with editing photos, Lightroom has far cooler tricks and does things like masking much better than Capture One does them.

We’re not quite sure if all these are coming to Lightroom Classic any time soon. The exception is Adaptive Presets, which has been available for a while now. Classic also has Select Subject, which can then be refined manually using brushes. Edit While Compare can be done in Lightroom Classic using the Reference view pretty easily. And Content Aware remove is sort of in Lightroom Classic, but can work in a completely different way.

“Adobe has introduced adaptive sky and subject presets. They are based on the same AI technology used for the Select Sky and Select Subject masking tools. The software accurately masks the subject or sky and only applies the effect to specific parts of your image.”

Our Lightroom Classic Review.

If Lightroom Classic gets the Select People and Select Object tool in addition to Content-Aware remove, I think that would be pretty awesome.

To this day though, I’m still kind of confused as to why they have two different products. I remember when Lightroom was first introduced, it was a way to appeal to newer photographers and speed up the software. As it is, Lightroom Classic still kind of operates a bit more dinosaur-like. I haven’t seen a ton of photographers move over to standard Lightroom either as most tutorials online cater to Lightroom Classic. Why can’t it all just be merged into Lightroom Classic and give Lightroom Classic the facelift that Lightroom has? Further, why can’t the more professional tools from Lightroom Classic be merged into Lightroom like the print panel, the better library, and more? There’s never a situation where I’d move over from Lightroom Classic into Lightroom.

It all continues to confuse me, and just today, I booted up Lightroom for the first time in well over a year. I’ll occasionally use Lightroom Classic for testing, but I still mostly do all my editing in Capture One. The camera manufacturers work directly with Capture One and in many times they even recommend it over Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.

We’ll be doing a review of the new Lightroom in the days to come, so please stay tuned!