Adobe Brings Built-in Video Editing to Lightroom

With the growing popularity of drones and short social media videos, most people who are serious about photography are shooting videos. Previously, for Adobe Lightroom (formerly Lightroom CC) users, it meant working with tools other than Lightroom. Lightroom Classic's video editing capabilities are limited, but the new features in the cloud-centric version of Lightroom go far beyond that. Adobe has made many other improvements to its Lightroom product, which we'll discuss in more detail in this article, but most notably, support for video editing.

We couldn't test the preview of the new Lightroom, so the following is based on the material and demos provided by Adobe. This product is currently available and will be worked on in the future and will be explained in more detail in the future.

Lightroom Video Editing

What's impressive is that Adobe doesn't just make Lightroom's photo editing tools available to video alone, but uses the same controls and presets for both to achieve a consistent look and feel throughout the project. That's what I was able to do. This is especially useful for photographers, but those who like to live up their work with B-Roll from drones and other interesting perspectives. The same approach is also very popular with wedding and event photographers. These are two of Lightroom's most important markets.

At first glance, the editing function is impressive. In my view, the cloud-first nature of modern lightroom can be a challenge for videographers given the size of the video and the cost of storing it online. At least for now, new features aren't available in Lightroom Classic, so Adobe clearly wants users to miss these hurdles and favor an integrated cross-platform video workflow.

Smarter presets for Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and ACR

While video editing capabilities are only available in Lightroom, most of the other new features are, as usual, available to users of Photoshop's Adobe Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). Today's release includes additional presets, a preset slider, and new premium preset packs. In particular, Adobe's new "AIpowered" adaptive presets can target specific areas of an image. For example, the sky enhancement preset will try to select only the sky for its effects.

The new Premium presets pack includes Black and White Portraits, Edge Portraits, Group Portraits, Concerts, and Video. Other new features in Lightroom for Mac and Windows include: AI-powered red-eye removal, edge-to-edge photo comparison, and community search.

Forward / backward and memory management in Lightroom

One handy navigation feature that Adobe added to Lightroom is the forward / backward control. This will be especially helpful for those using mobile devices.

Lightroom users will also benefit from an improved set of tools to help manage the disk space used locally by their images, as well as the ability to clear their local cache.

Pricing and Availability

All of these features are subscription product updates, so anyone with the appropriate current license can use them for free. Windows and Mac updates for Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are available, and Lightroom Mobile updates are available today through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.