What’s New in Lightroom (Cloud Service) October 2021 release?

The Lightroom cloud ecosystem has been updated today, with updates for Windows & Mac (5.0), iOS & Android (7.0) and Web. (Lightroom Classic has also been updated.)

New bugs…

• There are some reports of crashes when using Select Sky or Select Subject. In most cases, updating the graphics card driver from the manufacturer’s website solves this issue.

System Requirements

As usually happens with the Adobe Max releases, the minimum system requirements have been updated.

• Windows 10 requires v1909 or later, or Windows 11.
• macOS now requires 10.15 (Catalina) or later.
• Android now requires a minimum of 2GB of RAM (6GB is recommended).

Some of the new features, such as Select Subject/Sky are unavailable on low spec iOS and Android devices.

Masking

The headline addition to Lightroom is Masking, and wow, what a game-changer! You may have already seen Adobe’s sneak peak video a few weeks ago, so we’ll just cover the highlights in this blog post. We’ve completely rewritten that chapter in the Edit Like a Pro book, so you can learn to harness all of the power now at your fingertips.

Previously, Selective Editing had just three selection tools – Brush, Linear Gradient and Radial Gradient. These are still available, but there’s a whole set of new tools too. They’re available in all of the apps, whether you’re using Lightroom on the desktop or mobile.

Select Sky and Select Subject use artificial intelligence to automatically select the sky, a person, an animal, or any other kind of object that’s clearly the subject of the photo. It’s not perfect, but it’s amazing how well it works! On this little fluffy puppy, you can see that Select Subject (inverted) has almost perfectly selected the background (overlaid in red), with just a little fluff on his ears missing from the selection. How much time is that going to save!

If you’ve used Lightroom Classic, you’ll also be pleased to see that Color Range Mask, Luminance Range Mask and Depth Range Mask are all now available too. These automatically select areas of your photo depending on the color, brightness, or based on depth information captured by the camera.

Using all of these tools together brings a huge amount of power to your local adjustments, as well as speeding up your workflow.

You can go further too, as the different types of selection tool can be added or subtracted to create the perfect mask. You can now select around a window using 4 gradients, rather than having to paint a time-consuming mask. Or use Select Sky to capture most of the sky and add any bits it missed using the brush tool. Perhaps you want to apply additional noise reduction to only the shadow areas of a photo, so you use a Luminance Range mask to quickly select them. The possibilities are endless!

There’s also a new Masks panel, so you can easily manage your masks, renaming them and turn them on and off individually. There’s a range of new overlay styles, so you can easily see which areas of the photo are being affected. And what’s more, your individual masks can be copied to other photos or saved as part of a preset.

Presets

The Presets panel is now divided into Recommended, Premium and Yours. There’s 8 new sets of Premium presets to enjoy.

Recommended presets are AI-based preset suggestions, tailored specifically for the selected photo, and made using community presets from the Discover section of Lightroom. It’s a brilliant way of trying out new styles and considering ideas that are out of your comfort zone. Many people currently buy preset packs for this purpose, but all of these suggestions are absolutely free!

Remix (desktop only)

Ready to try out your editing skills on a different style of photo? When you select the Remixes tab in the Discover view on the desktop, you can not only see how the photographer edited their photo, but also how other people have applied their own style and vision… and then you can give it a go yourself.

Manually add GPS Data (desktop only)

Even if your camera isn’t GPS-enabled, you can now manually add GPS co-ordinates to your photos. You might copy them from another phone-captured photo, or copy/paste them from Google Maps.

Crop Overlays (desktop only)

The rule-of-thirds crop overlay has been available since release, but there’s a whole new set of crop overlays to help with your composition. If you’ve previously used Lightroom Classic, they’ll be familiar. They are Grid, Thirds, Diagonal, Center, Golden Spiral, Golden Ratio and Aspect Ratio.

Other Improvements

• Windows/Mac – The Recent Edits view mode, which was previously available on mobile, is now also on the Desktop.
• Windows/Mac – Video playback now works in full screen mode.
• iOS – When shooting with Lightroom’s camera on iOS15, the ultra-wide lens can now capture in DNG format.
• Android – performance improvements for Grid view loading.

New Camera Support