APP STORE AWARDS

Mac App of the Year

Adobe Lightroom

Edit, manage and share photos

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Adobe Lightroom’s newest AI‑powered features have fundamentally changed how we edit photos – and how we shoot them.

– App Store Editors

This revered photo editor and image manager added a slew of generative AI enhancements this year. Like no other app we used, Adobe Lightroom magically eliminated photobombers, automatically masked images and sorted through our sprawling photo libraries. But the app’s biggest impact might be how it shifted our approach to photography in subtle but fundamental ways.

To remove unsightly elements from the background, try Generative Remove. Instead of cloning the background, the app uses generative AI to essentially redraw an area – and it even works on complex backgrounds. It’s just one of Lightroom’s many AI-enhanced tools.

AI-powered Denoise completely upended how we shoot in low light. Trained on millions of photos, the tool identifies and corrects noise patterns that look like grain or random specks.

Knowing we could remove noise later, we took a different approach to photographing an indoor event where we couldn’t use a flash: we set our camera ISO to 12800. This let us capture detail in low light – but with a ton of grain. Applying Denoise and a few other simple adjustments resulted in great images, even when we zoomed in.

Lightroom’s AI-based masking, meanwhile, drastically sped up our editing workflow. When a sunset photo we took didn’t look as vibrant as we remembered, we had Lightroom select only the sky. From there, we could increase contrast to add drama to the clouds and boost white balance to bring out the gold of the setting sun.

Photographing these swans in the low light of early morning resulted in a noisy image (left). Thankfully, Lightroom’s AI-powered Denoise feature worked its magic.

AI-assisted masking is even more impressive with portraits. Not only can it mask people, but it also offers checkboxes for selecting just their hair, clothes, teeth, lips, eyebrows and even their irises and pupils.

And Lightroom’s new Lens Blur tool helped us see old family portraits in a new light. It uses AI to apply a bokeh effect to any photo, blurring the background while keeping the subject sharp. We especially appreciated the focus-range options, which can keep people standing behind the main subject in focus while blurring the rest of the background. It created a gorgeous new look in seconds.

Lens Blur adds the bokeh effect to any photo – even if the image doesn’t include depth data.

We appreciate that Lightroom also encourages transparency. Adobe’s new Content Credentials technology ensures that when someone opens your images in a supported app, they can quickly see what kinds of AI adjustments were applied.

In a year full of promises about creativity and AI, few visual tools helped creatives realise their vision like Lightroom.

Check the Information section on the app’s product page for device compatibility details.

Quick tip

Want to apply the tweaks you made to one photo to many others? It’s as easy as copying and pasting the edit settings. This feature also works with masking: if you’ve created masks to adjust only a person’s eyes or clothing, those will be applied to other photos of the same person – even if their position changes from one image to another!

Fun fact

Lightroom started as a side project, code-named Shadowland, by Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg. His goal was to help photographers handle a large volume of RAW files. Shadowland was a reference to one of his favourite country music albums.

Meet the creator

Adobe was founded in 1982 by computer scientists Charles Geschke and John Warnock. Since its 2007 debut, Lightroom has grown into an entire ecosystem that includes Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and mobile versions of the app.