Huge June 2025 Lightroom Update Dropped by Adobe

In this latest update, Adobe has packed Lightroom with features designed to streamline your workflow and boost creativity. From new AI-powered removing tools to improvements to the denoise process.

Adobe has just announced a huge update to Lightroom. Stick around to find out what extra you are getting!

Hi, I'm Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and welcome to Coffee Break Photography! On this channel, we keep our content short and sweet—perfect for enjoying during your coffee break. I read and reply to viewer comments during my breaks, so be sure to leave a message below about this week's episode.  

In this latest update, Adobe has packed Lightroom with features designed to streamline your workflow and boost creativity. From new AI-powered removing tools to improvements to the denoise process, this update has something for everyone. And if that's not enough, Adobe has introduced a game-changing feature for mobile users that brings desktop-level power to your fingertips. 

Before we kick off with the new features, let me remind you how to update to the latest version of Lightroom. Open the Adobe Cloud app and click on the updates button. All the products with an update are listed. Make sure the program is closed and then click the update button. If you’d prefer Adobe to always update to the latest version, you can click on Manage auto-updates and select which programs should update automatically. I might not have done this a few years ago for fear of things stopping working, but Adobe has been pretty good at testing updates before they are released, and I feel comfortable enough now to let them update on their own.

Let’s dive into the changes, and we are going to start with a neat way to remove distractions. At this time of year, it’s almost impossible to take a photo in Edinburgh without people being included in the picture. Here’s a shot taken just after 9AM on West Bow, allegedly the street JK Rowling based Diagon Alley on. There’s already a queue of Harry Potter fans waiting to get into the shop where you can buy officially licensed products. We’re going to get rid of them by clicking on the Remove tool (or you can press Q). Open up the People menu and Lightroom identifies with an overlay what it thinks are people. You can see the selection has wrongly identified this street-post as a person. No problem, just click on the pin and press the delete key. Rather than saying, “Evanesco” the Harry Potter vanishing spell, just click remove and in a few seconds all the people have disappeared. Now that’s proper magic!

Now for more trickery! Let’s say you’re on this Harry Potter street, and you see the elf, Dobbie, through one of the shop windows. Click your shutter and this is what you see. All the reflections of the street, and there is even a rather handsome photographer! Go into the Remove menu again, but this time open the Reflections menu and tick the Apply checkbox. Give it a few seconds for the AI to get to work. There we have it, all the reflections have gone! You can use the slider to move between removing all the reflections with the slider maxed on the right, to removing everything inside the shop by pushing the slider to the left.

The reflections tool does have a few foibles. You need to be close up to the subject being photographed. Here’s a shot from the top of the street and there is clearly a reflection in this window of the buildings on the opposite side of the street. I’ll click on apply again and let Lightroom do it’s magic.

When the reflections are a smaller part of the scene, the tool doesn’t really work in the same way. Just something to bear in mind, but this is a great development for photographing through glass.

Another development is the Denoise function that we find in the Detail section of the Lightroom Develop panel. Until this update dropped, when you clicked on Denoise you would be presented with a preview of how the function would work. You could adjust the amount of denoise to be applied then when you click on the enhance button, Lightroom would start to process the file. After about twenty-five seconds, which I have speeded up here, Lightroom would create a new DNG file with the denoise applied. The DNG file size is huge, in this case 92 megabytes instead of the original 52 megabytes. If you wanted to change the amount of denoising you’d need to go back to the original file and repeat the process all over again, creating another massive file.

With the update, the Denoise button has been replaced with a checkbox. Lightroom applies the denoise (again taking about twenty-five seconds, depending on your processor) but this time the changes are being applied to the actual file and not creating a new one.  You can now move the denoise slider right and left to increase or decrease the amount of denoising which is done pretty much instantly.

There are more behind the scenes changes introduced in this update. Fuji camera owners have always had an issue tethering their camera to shoot direct into Lightroom. That’s been fixed ion this release. There are some performance improvements when using the brush tool or adding gradients. As usual there are also a whole range of new cameras and lenses that are supported by Lightroom. But there is one more thing…..

When you buy a subscription to Adobe Lightroom, you also get access to Lightroom mobile. And Adobe, has really beefed up the capability of Lightroom on your phone. Open the picture you want to edit and click on the scene option. Lightroom goes away to identify the different elements in the photo such as sky, mountains or water and you can then edit those parts of the shot with the sliders. 

I really do believe that even at the increased subscription price of £14.99 a month that Lightroom is a bargain. These regular drops of new functionality and performance improvements enables Adobe to be more fleet of foot in introducing new features, instead of waiting for the next annual release that other software companies prefer. The new version is available now, so go ahead, download it and start having fun editing!

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