8 New Features in Lightroom Classic 16, From Glow to Depth Masks

Lightroom Classic 16 arrived with Adobe MAX, bringing a native glow effect, depth masks that no longer depend on special camera files, color grading inside masks, and automatic blemish removal. Several of these used to require a trip to Photoshop, a plugin, or a phone that recorded depth data.

Matt Kloskowski starts with glow, which showed up in Camera Raw a few months earlier and now lives in the Effects panel of the Develop module. If you've tried the Orton effect, the look will feel familiar: highlights bloom outward, brighten, and can wash out a little as you push it. Amount sets the strength, range spreads the effect beyond the brightest areas, and speed controls how tightly the glow stays near its source. Hold Option or Alt while dragging, and you get a black and white preview where white shows what's affected. There's also a warmth control for tinting the glow, along with five styles: bloom, diffusion, halation, motion, and streak. Kloskowski reaches for bloom on landscapes, diffusion on waterfalls, and halation on night scenes, and his waterfall example shows how diffusion softens the frame without smearing detail.

Masking gets the most changes. Color grading has been in the main edit panels for a while, yet you couldn't apply it to a mask until now. Kloskowski brushes over a green cast under a monkey and shifts only the highlights in that area toward red, leaving exposure and the rest of the frame alone. Being able to fix color in one spot without a global grade fixing one problem and creating another elsewhere is a real gain for anyone who edits mixed lighting. A new focus points checkbox in Develop also draws a box over the spot where your camera focused. Kloskowski admits he rarely needs it, since a photo is either sharp or it isn't, though he knows some people like it as a way to learn from their misses.

Depth-based editing has been creeping into desktop software from phones for years. Lightroom's Depth Range mask first appeared to support files with embedded depth maps, the kind iPhones save in Portrait mode, so it sat unused by almost anyone shooting a mirrorless camera or DSLR. Generating the depth map from the image itself removes that requirement, and it opens up one of the oldest tricks in landscape painting: atmospheric perspective. Distant objects naturally look lower in contrast, lighter, and slightly cooler because of the air between them and the viewer. With a far-range depth mask, you can lift the shadows a touch, cut contrast, and cool the background to push mountains or tree lines farther back. Flip the mask to near, and you can add contrast and warmth to the foreground so it steps forward. Painters have used this to fake depth on flat canvas for centuries, and a depth mask lets you exaggerate or restore it on a photo that came out of camera looking flat.

In practice, the new depth range mask analyzes the photo for a moment after you add it, then lets you click a spot to set the range. A gradient bar runs from near on the left to far on the right, with fall-off handles on each end. Turning on the depth map view shows near areas in white and distant ones in black. Kloskowski is upfront that the result isn't perfect, and his waterfall example misses part of a tree in the foreground, which he patches by adding to the mask with the object selection tool. You can now also right-click to reorder the masking panel, so tools you lean on, like effects, move up, though a relaunch is needed before the change sticks. Outside masking, a projection option under Transform targets the stretched edges you get from very wide-angle lenses. The blemish removal tool rates each spot it finds, and a separate natural marks slider decides whether things like moles stay or go, with a refine brush for anything it grabs by mistake. Import gains filtering by star ratings and color labels, which helps if you cull in another program before bringing files in.

Kloskowski also makes a case for the other version of Lightroom, the one simply called Lightroom, which he switched to two years ago and says he has never regretted. He isn't talking about the cloud. He points it at the same folders on his hard drive, and the flags, star ratings, color labels, and keywords from Lightroom Classic show up there, with edits that come across easily too, all without the catalog he found cumbersome. He grants that some people need everything Classic offers, but for many others, he calls it a bloated program full of features they never use.

If you retouch portraits, watch the blemish removal pass in the video, where the two sliders separate the spots Lightroom rates as blemishes from the moles and other natural marks you may want to keep.