Adobe really made some great improvements to Lightroom in 2021. The new masking architecture is a great upgrade and it’s changed the way I use the software. In the past Adobe has been criticised for not doing enough with Lightroom, but over the past few years they’ve really taken the breaks off and made some good improvements. There can always be more though, and so, here is my modest wish list of things I’d love to see changed in the application.

Most of these aren’t big flashy features or huge changes. Many of these are small fixes for long running issues, or tweaks to existing features. To be honest, I’m not particularly confident any of these will see the light of day, so this is really just a fun little exercise for my own sake, but anyway. Also, most of these apply to all versions of Lightroom and camera raw, except those specifically about Lightroom classic and the cloud.

In no particular order…

Fix the clarity algorithm so it doesn’t halo

This is one of my oldest personal bugbears with Lightroom. If you use clarity on a scene with high contrast edges, you often get a halo around those edges. For example, a landscape scene with a building protruding into the sky, will often end up with a dark halo around the building. Any situation where there is a subject against a strongly defined area of solid colour or detail will cause this effect. It’s one of those things that you can spot a mile away on other people’s photos, and it’s something I really wish they’d fix. You don’t get this with Capture One’s clarity algorithm(s) so we know it can be done.

example of clarity halo in Lightroom (exaggerated for demonstration) — example of clarity halo (exaggerated for demonstration)

Sync Presets and Profiles with Lightroom Cloud

I use Lightroom on my iPhone all the time, but I don’t really use the desktop version of Lightroom cloud that much. I prefer to use Lightroom Classic. This is probably the same workflow lots of people use, and yet, there are still some hoops to jump through if this is the way you operate.

It would be great if Lightroom Classic could sync any presets and profiles that you might create or use in Lightroom Classic with the cloud version of Lightroom. As it is, the process for getting these across is somewhat tedious.

It wouldn’t even have to be automatic. A button or menu item to sync would be enough (although full automatic sync would be better.)

Allow you to upload full-res images to the cloud

Speaking of cloud related issues, another one that is particularly frustrating is the fact that you can’t upload full-res versions of images from Lightroom Classic. To do this you need to use Lightroom desktop, and this seems like another unnecessary inconsistency.

There are plenty of times when you may need access to the full version of an image remotely, and with a cloud storage and syncing system right there built in, it seems like an unnecessary and arbitrary limitation to prevent you from doing this. Please, Adobe, at least allow this as an option.

Add an Opacity Slider to Masks

Screenshot of the Lightroom 11 interface showing the masking tools

I would love to see an opacity slider added to the new masking options. Having ability to “fade” the adjustments on a masked layer would be really useful and is something that already exists in Capture One (That’s how I know it’s useful!)

While we’re at it, if you do add an opacity slider, the ability to add a completely filled mask would also be really useful. This way you can add extra effects to your image and control the amounts. For those who haven’t used Capture One, this may not sound like a big deal, but it’s actually super useful. It’s also handy sometimes to start with a filled mask and then subtract from it with the other tools, rather than having to paint it over with a brush or some other option first. There is kind of a way to do this as is - but it’s a bit of a workaround - so it would be nice if it was an explicit option.

Another useful option in masks would be the ability to blur a mask in order to feather a selection. If fact, they could add a whole range of “operators” that could act on masks. Imaging being able to add a blur and a levels adjustment to a mask, rather than having to go to Photoshop to do the same. This will probably never happen, but one can dream!

Camera blur (bokeh) option in the masking tools / selective edits and AI based depth mask

Speaking of masking, another thing I’d like to see is a better blur option in the adjustments that you can apply to a mask. As it is you can use negative sharpness to soften an image, but I would love a proper camera blur with bokeh option here.

While we’re on the subject, I’d also like to see an AI based depth masking option. This was recently added to Photoshop in the Neural filters tool, and it’s kind of amazing. Having the ability to generate a depth based mask in Lightroom would be fantastic. You could use it for all sorts of this, from adding fog to background blur (with he afore mentioned bokeh/camera blur). Come on Adobe, you know you want to!

Easier ability to use LUTs in the software, and ability to create creative profiles within Lightroom without having to go to Photoshop first

You can actually use LUTs in Lightroom already, but the process to do so is very long-winded and tedious. To do it, you have to use Photoshop, and then you have to go to create a profile, and then embed the LUT in the profile. It would be great if you could just load LUTs into the software directly. It could be included in the Custom Profiles section as an option.

While we’re talking about profiles, it would be great if you could create a profile directly within Lightroom too. As it is you have to do this in Photoshop, in Camera Raw, but there’s no reason they couldn’t include the option to create a Creative Profile from your current settings directly in Lightroom just as easily as creating a preset.

Improve the Noise Reduction and Sharpening Algorithms

Sharpening and Noise Reduction are ok in Lightroom but they are getting old, and far from best in class. The technology has moved on and there have been great strides made recently in these areas, particularly noise deduction, so it would be great to see Lightroom take advantage of some of these advancements.

For sharpening, it would be great to see lens based falloff sharpening. This is something that exists in both Capture One and DXO PhotoLab. Lenses often fall off in sharpness towards the edges of the frame, and some software uses profiles to apply more sharpening in the correct places depending on the lens. It would be nice to see this feature or something similar in Lightroom too.

Lightroom’s noise reduction is also not as good as some of the competition. In recent years there has been some pretty great advancements in de-noising technology, especially with the arrival of AI based de-noising. Adobe could add something like this to the already AI based “Enhance” function. Even without this I’m sure the noise reduction algorithms could be improved by now. The current version has been around since Lightroom version 4 I think. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong on that)

Conclusion

So there you have some of the things I’d love to see added to Lightroom over the next little while. I don’t think any of this is rocket science or anything too onerous to do. I doubt any of these ideas will ever see the light of day, but you never know. People from Adobe do occasionally read this blog, so you never know. In the mean time, what are the things that you would like to see in future versions of Lightroom (be nice)?

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