Lightroom’s Masking Just Got Much Better

Adobe released new updates across its Lightroom ecosystem, including Lightroom Classic, Lightroom on desktop, Lightroom for iPad, and Lightroom for mobile. There is a wide range of exciting updates across the board.

In Lightroom Classic 15.5, the go-to choice for many photographers, there are the expected camera and lens support additions, including for the GoPro Mission 1 and Mission 1 Pro cameras and the Laowa 65mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO, Laowa 90mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO, and Sigma 85mm f/1.2 DG lenses.

There’s also a new function to adjust the opacity of cropped-out areas when using Lightroom Classic’s crop tool and the option to save photos as new DNG files with current edits applied.

But perhaps the best addition for most photographers is new ways to refine a selected mask. Users can now use feather and edge sliders to soften edges of their mask or expand or contract its selected area. This should help photographers dial in the perfect mask and achieve better results, especially in complicated scenes with very fine details, like trees or hair.

In addition to new camera and lens support and the same new mask refinement tools as Lightroom Classic 15.5, Lightroom 9.5 now includes Generative Expand.

Generative Expand is now available in Lightroom 9.5 and Lightroom Mobile. | Adobe

This AI-powered feature lets Lightroom users expand the frame of their photo, leveraging AI to fill in the blank space. This has been a key feature inside Adobe Photoshop for a while now, and it is good to see it make its way to Lightroom. This is also coming to Lightroom on iPhone.

As Adobe’s Terry Lee White explains over on Reddit, there is a new version of Lightroom on iPad, too.

White specifically calls out AI Denoise on iPad, which he describes as the number-one most requested feature among Lightroom users on iPad.

“You can now melt away high-ISO noise directly on your iPad without sacrificing those fine details. This has been a huge favorite on Desktop and Classic, and bringing it into the tablet workflow is a game-changer,” White writes.

As he notes, AI Denoise is resource-intensive, so it requires users to have an M-Series iPad with at least 8GB of RAM.

All the new August Lightroom updates are available now.