I mostly use Lightroom classic, and based on a poll I posted on my Facebook page earlier this year, most of you are the same. However, recently I’ve seen more and more people using the cloud version of Lightroom on YouTube and elsewhere. Because I don’t use it that much, I missed one of the new features in the latest release, that’s actually kind of cool.

Note that this feature is in the mobile version of Lightroom too, so when I refer to it as “Lightroom Cloud” I’m referring to the whole family. However for the purposes of simplification, I’m only going to talk about Lightroom Desktop - the desktop version. Officially called “Lightroom Mac and PC” but which they refer to internally as “Lightroom Desktop”, so that’s what I’m going to call it. I really wish they had made this easier to refer to.

While Lightroom desktop generally gets the same features added to its develop engine as Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw, it’s also started to diverge a little too, and it’s beginning to offer more features that take advantage of its cloud based heritage. There are community and online based features in Lightroom (Cloud) that aren’t in Lightroom Classic. One of these new features is “recommended presets”.

When you go to edit an image in Lightroom Desktop (version 5.0) and you go to the presets panel you’ll notice some new options. Whereas before you would see a list of your own presets, now you will see three separate headings: “Recommended, Premium and Yours”.

Premium are the new “Premium” presets that come with Lightroom. Adobe has added to these in the most recent version, and these are available across the family in all version of Lightroom, and also Camera Raw.

Yours are your own presets that you may have installed, and will be the same as what you’re used to in the presets panel.

The first entry though, Recommended, is the new one. It will analyse your image and then recommend presets to you taken from the Lightroom community. You can share your edits to the community too (I think that this has been in the software since the previous version, but I could be wrong on that).

After your image is analysed, you will get a selection of preset recommendations. These are broken down into categories:

All: a selection from all of the presets available
Subtle: presets with a lighter touch on the editing
Strong: Presets which have a stronger effect
B&W: Black and White (and duotone) presets
Cool: Presets which have a cooler tone
Warm: The opposite of cool!
Dark: Presets which have an emphasis on darker tones
Bright: Presets which have an emphasis on brighter tones
Cinematic: Presets labelled as “cinematic” - I would use this term loosely, but that’s a whole other post!
HDR: Presets designed for HDR files

You can preview one of these by hovering over them, and if you like one, you can click on it to apply it. If you like a particular preset, but it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, when you hover over you will get a button that says “More like this” and when you click on it, the software will present similar presets.

Are they any good?

Well, as with anything, some are good, and some are not so good. Some are awful. But it does give access to a wide range of options from the community. Sometimes you will get a lot of very similar results. You’re not going to find anything as good as premium presets that you pay for here, but some of them aren’t bad. If you search around for a while you may find something interesting.

If you’re thinking that this sounds familiar, it’s because there is a similar feature in Luminar AI. It will recommend presets based on the image, but Luminar does this from the ones it comes installed with or with any you buy from Skylum. They have to be downloaded and installed. Lightroom on the other hand crowdsources them from the community, and so you can find a lot more this way and they’re free. They may not be of the same quality, but they are free.

Now, as with anything, this may not be your cup of tea, and if so, that’s fine. You can just hide them and stick to the premium ones or your own. But it’s good to see Adobe expanding the scope of the software, and maybe going in a bit of a different direction. There are some good opportunities here, and perhaps it will allow for a built in market place in the future.

I do like using Lightroom Desktop. I like the more modern interface and the controls of the edit mode. There are some clunky things about the way it manages images and the organisation side of the software. For me, the big thing that keeps me from using it more is the lack of any plug-in support or even the ability to edit as a smart object in Photoshop. If they would add a few more features like this, then I would definitely use it more. The ability to sync full-res images with mobile devices is a big plus too. The syncing in Lightroom classic is quite messy, and especially if you use multiple catalogues. For now though, I’ll keep playing with it more, but will probably stick to Lightroom Classic for the time being.

If you’d like me to cover this version of Lightroom more, let me know in the comments below.