MAX 2021 Photography Releases
Photograph by Chris Ayers.
The Adobe photography team is thrilled to announce the latest updates to Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. These releases start rolling out today, and will be available to everyone over the course of this week. Read all about the exciting new changes that will help enhance your photography skills, make impactful edits easier, and help to make your photographs shine. We are also announcing brand-new ways to experiment, learn, and connect with the Lightroom community to assist photographers of all levels to develop.
Precise Selection and Masking
(ACR, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android)
Create more powerful and precise selections on any device
Our Selective Adjustment tools have been entirely re-envisioned, all accessible with one click on the newly named masking button. Create more complex and accurate selections with multiple masks, including utilizing color and luminance masks. This improved experience is rolling out to all devices, enabling you to easily select the photograph’s areas you want to change without any fuss or fiddling.
Select Subject & Select Sky
(ACR, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS*, Android*).
Dynamic edits at your fingertips with only one tap
Utilizing advanced machine learning-based AI, you can now create precise selections to identify your photograph’s subject and sky and apply specific edits to them with one tap. Select Subject & Select Sky are game-changers for time-consuming improvements, especially on smaller screens, lowering the barrier to making complex selections. Using artificial intelligence supports you by making careful selections to transform your photos and help you achieve your artistic vision.
Watch this video by Pei Ketron to see the new precise selection and masking — including Select Subject & Select Sky — in action.
* Full list of supported mobile devices for Select Subject & Select Sky here.
Recommended Presets
(Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android, Web).
Discover the best presets shared by the Lightroom community tailored to your photo’s subject
Find the perfect preset for your photo, created by some of the most creative photographers in the world: the Lightroom community. Lightroom can suggest a selection of presets that will enhance your photograph’s beauty by scanning your image & matching the subject with the presets that will improve your shot. Discover has hundreds of thousands of incredible presets created and shared by our community and can be an excellent springboard for your editing process.
8 Additional Premium Preset Packs
(ACR, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Mac/Win, iOS, Android, Web)
Even more high-quality presets to choose from
After the positive response to the launch of our 7 initial Premium Preset packs in June, we’re excited to expand the Premium Presets in Lightroom! These high-quality presets are created by an expanded pool of talented and diverse contemporary photographers to transform your photos. This new set of Premium Presets includes eight new categories: Black & White, Food, Landscape, Urban Architecture, Lifestyle, Retro, Travel II, and Cinematic II. These gorgeous presets help take your photography to the next level, and with the range of new premium presets — we’re sure there will be something to fit your aesthetic. These new packs will be available across the entire ecosystem, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you create.
Community Remix
(Lightroom Mac/Win)
Explore and engage with how different community members edit photography
Engage with the Lightroom community in an entirely new way with Community Remix. Share your unique edit with the community, let others try alternative edits, and share their artistic vision with the image. Making space for play encourages entirely new perspectives from across the world — whether that be a stark monochrome edit, a dreamy pastel version, or an evocative moody style. Explore versions of different landscapes far away from your home, experiment with varying subjects of photography, or even other camera lenses. This brand new experience is available on Lightroom Mac & Windows now, and we will be working on bringing this to other platforms soon.
Crop overlays
(Lightroom Mac/Win)
Fine-tune your photograph’s framing
Smart cropping changes the entire narrative and impact of your shot. With this release, we’ve now included the ability for you to choose new crop overlays for different aspect ratios to improve your photo’s composition. To use the new overlays in Lightroom on your Mac or Windows computer, click the overlay drop-down and experiment with new overlays, including visualizing the Rule of 3rds or Golden Ratio.
Lightroom Academy
(Web)
Learn and grow as a photographer
Introducing a brand-new way to engage with photography! Lightroom Academy is a resource for photographers that offers a fresh approach to learning essential photographic concepts and improving image processing skills regardless of experience or equipment. Topics are broken down into short-form articles featuring — succinct text, images by our worldwide Lightroom community, interactive illustrations, quiz-like challenges, and numerous “On Your Own” exercises that all encourage learning by doing. Lightroom Academy is entirely free and available to start exploring today! Plus, we’ll be continuing to update Lightroom Academy with new classes and resources throughout 2022.
Full description of new features
For more information about all of the improvements and updates in each product, for both this and previous releases of Lightroom, please see the What’s New pages below:
Don’t forget to join us this week for Adobe MAX for great workshops and sessions on photography. See an overview of all the photography sessions at MAX here.