Lightroom Classic 16.0 arrived in November 2026. It adds ten new tools and changes, spread across every stage of the job: choosing what to import, checking focus, masking, color, retouching portraits, fixing wide-angle shots and keeping the catalog lean. This page explains what each one does, where to find it, and when it is worth reaching for, so you can decide which ones belong in your own way of working.
Adobe’s own summary lists the features. What follows goes further: the exact menu paths, the controls and what they change, the limits Adobe states, and the older tool each new one sits beside.
The release at a glance
- Import filters (Import dialog, filter bar): bring in only the frames you rated, labelled or protected in camera.
- Focus Points (Loupe view in Library and Develop): see exactly where the camera locked focus.
- Depth Range on any photo (Masking, Range): select by distance from the camera, even without depth data.
- Color Grading in masks (Masking, Color Grading section): tint the shadows, midtones and highlights of one area only.
- Customizable Masking panel (right-click any mask adjustment section): reorder sections and keep favourite sliders on top.
- Glow (Effects panel): soft light spreading from highlights, in five styles.
- Blemish removal (Remove tool, Distraction Removal): clear spots, moles and freckles on faces automatically.
- Vectorscope (right-click the Histogram): read hue and saturation, and check skin tones and colour casts.
- Projection slider (Transform panel): fix stretched faces at the edges of wide-angle shots.
- Clear history steps (Photo or Develop menu, Catalog Settings): shrink the catalog without changing how any photo looks.
Two smaller changes ride along: the Temp slider reaches further toward warm (its minimum drops from 2000 K to 1500 K on raw files, and from -100 to -150 on JPEGs and other non-raw files), and more camera models can now shoot tethered. Support for new cameras and lenses is covered near the end.
If you would rather watch the new tools in use first, this video walks through the release:
Filter photos before you import
The Import dialog now has a filter bar above the preview grid. Instead of scrolling through a full card and unticking frames, you can show only the photos that match what you already decided in the field:
- File type: pick one or more types, such as only the raw files when you shot raw plus JPEG.
- Rating: show photos at or above a star rating. If you star keepers on the camera’s screen, this is where that work pays off.
- Color Labels: one or more labels.
- Lock and Unlock: protected status. Lock shows the frames you marked as protected on the camera; Unlock shows the rest.
- Reset Filter clears everything and shows every photo again.
The filters work inside the All Photos, New Photos and Destination Folders views. One catch: when you import from a card reader, the filters appear only if you reach the card through the Files section of the Source panel. Adobe says the filters also carry over to Assisted Culling, the feature that picks the strongest frames from a large batch while you import.
Filtering at import is not the same as deleting. The frames you leave out stay on the card. If you format the card afterwards, they are gone, so filter only when you are sure, or import everything to a folder you keep and filter inside Lightroom later.
New to the Import dialog itself, the Copy, Move and Add choices and where files end up? Lightroom for beginners walks through it from the first import.
See where your camera focused
Focus Points draws the camera’s own autofocus record over the photo. A red box shows where focus locked; gray boxes show the other points the camera recorded. When you have twenty frames of the same face and only some are sharp on the eye, this tells you why before you zoom in on each one.
To turn it on, open a photo in Loupe view in the Library or Develop module, right-click it and choose Show Autofocus Points. You can also add a Focus Points button to the toolbar from the toolbar options menu. The overlay stays with you while you zoom, crop, flip or transform the photo.
The limits matter:
- It works on raw files from Canon, Nikon and Sony cameras that record autofocus data. Other brands are not supported in this release.
- It needs the original raw file. Smart Previews and DNG proxies may not carry the autofocus data, and the option is greyed out on any photo without it.
- It shows where the camera says it focused. A red box on the eye with a soft eye in the picture points to motion blur or camera shake, not a focus miss.
Wondering why the camera chose that point, or how to make it choose yours? Autofocus points explains how cameras pick them and how to take control, and back-button focus separates focusing from the shutter.
Depth Range masks on any photo
Depth Range selects parts of a photo by how far they were from the camera. Until now it needed depth information stored in the file, which in practice meant phone portrait-mode photos. In 16.0 Lightroom Classic builds a depth map itself, so it works on photos from any camera.
- In the Develop module, open Masking (Shift + W).
- Choose Range > Depth Range to start a new mask, or Add or Subtract > Depth Range to refine an existing one.
- If the file does carry depth data from the device, you can choose Use Device Depth instead of the generated map.
- Click a point to sample its depth, or drag over an area to sample a band of depths. Then drag the handles on the Depth Range control to widen or narrow the band.
- Tick Show Depth Map to see what Lightroom thinks: white is near the camera, black is far, greys are in between. Invert swaps what is selected.
This does things the AI Subject and Background masks cannot. A landscape has no “subject”, but it has a foreground, a middle distance and far hills. Select the far band and lower Dehaze slightly to deepen the haze, select the near band and add a touch of texture, and the scene gains depth the eye reads at once. In a portrait, a band that covers the person and the ground at their feet behaves more naturally than a subject mask that cuts them off at the ankles.
Check the depth map before you trust it. A generated map is an estimate, and fine detail such as hair, branches against the sky or glass is where estimates go wrong. Combine Depth Range with a brush or another mask using Subtract when it bleeds into the wrong area.
Need the rest of the masking toolkit, Subject, Sky, People, brushes and how to combine them? Lightroom masking and selective adjustments covers each mask type with worked examples.
Color Grading inside a mask
The Color Grading panel lets you tint shadows, midtones and highlights separately, the classic route to warm highlights and cool shadows. Until now it applied to the whole photo. In 16.0 every mask has its own Color Grading section.
Create or select a mask, then expand Color Grading in the Masking panel. For Highlights, Midtones and Shadows, Hue picks the color of the tint and Saturation sets its strength. Blending controls how much the three tonal ranges overlap (right for more overlap, left for less), and Balance shifts the weight toward highlights (positive) or shadows (negative). These controls are the same as in the global panel; what changes is that they apply only inside the mask.
The modifier keys that make the color wheels easier to control work here too: hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) for fine adjustment, Shift to change saturation only, and Ctrl or Command to change hue only.
Where this earns its place: warming only the sunlit side of a face, cooling the shadows of a sky without touching the land, or giving a background a slightly different color from the subject so the subject separates. Keep saturation low. A grade that is obvious in a mask looks like a mistake, because the eye sees the edge where it starts.
Want to read the colors you are grading rather than judge them by eye? The Vectorscope, further down this page, is new in this release too.
Customize the Masking panel
A mask now offers the full set of adjustments: Tone, Color, Point Color, Color Grading, Curve, Effects and Detail. That is a long panel to scroll. After applying a mask, right-click any adjustment section to get:
- Customize Masking Panel: drag the sections into the order you use them.
- Customize Favorites: choose the sliders you reach for most and keep them in a Favorites section at the top.
- Solo Mode: opening one section closes the others.
- Expand All and Collapse All.
Restart Lightroom Classic after customizing; the new layout appears on the next launch. A sensible Favorites set for most local work is Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Temp, Clarity and Dehaze, but the point is to choose your own.
Add glow to highlights
Glow spreads light outward from the bright parts of a photo: streetlights in mist, a low sun through trees, candles, neon. It sits in the Effects panel of the Develop module, and masks have a Glow slider too. Drag Amount to add it, then choose one of five styles:
- Diffusion softens the whole image with a luminous haze. Try it on backlit portraits and misty mornings.
- Bloom spreads a bright glow out from the highlights. Try it on city lights at night and sun through leaves.
- Halation adds a warm red or orange edge around highlights, like film. Try it on bright windows and practical lights, or for a film look.
- Motion stretches the glow in one direction. Try it on car lights or for a sense of movement.
- Streak stretches the glow in two opposite directions. Try it on point lights for a cinematic lens look.
The sliders under the style shape it. Range decides which tones glow: low keeps it to the brightest highlights, high lets more of the image glow. Spread sets how far the glow reaches; higher is wider and softer. Warmth makes it cooler or warmer, and with Halation it moves the fringe from orange to red. Motion and Streak add Direction, the angle of the trail, and Softness. Adobe also ships ready-made glow presets such as Sheer, Dream, Soft Bloom, Strong Bloom, Gentle Aura and Cinematic Glow, which make good starting points.
Glow is not Clarity turned down, and it is not Dehaze turned negative. Both of those lower contrast across the frame. Glow adds light that seems to come from the light sources, which is why it reads as atmosphere rather than as a flat, foggy edit. A little goes a long way: if the first thing a viewer notices is the glow, it is too strong.
Curious where the look comes from? Halation explains the film effect Halation imitates, and the Orton effect covers the older darkroom route to a dreamy glow.
Remove skin blemishes automatically
Blemish removal finds small marks on faces and clears them in one step. In the Develop module, open the photo in Loupe view, choose the Remove tool, expand Blemishes in the Distraction Removal section and click Apply. Then tune two sliders:
- Blemishes handles temporary marks such as spots and sores. At 100 it removes everything it detected; lower values remove only the most prominent.
- Natural Marks handles moles and freckles. Its default of 50 fades them partway; raise it to fade them further.
Click Refine to correct the result with a brush (set its Size first). Restore paints back detail you want to keep, such as a beauty mark or a freckle that belongs to the face. Remove clears a mark the tool missed. Clear drops all refinements, and Reset restores the original skin. In a group photo, pick one face to adjust it alone, or choose All People to apply the same settings to every detected face.
The separate sliders exist for a reason. A spot is temporary; a mole or a field of freckles is part of what someone looks like. Removing everything at 100 is the fastest way to make a portrait subject say “that doesn’t look like me”. Clear the temporary marks, soften the permanent ones a little or not at all, and ask when in doubt.
Need the manual tools for marks on clothes, backgrounds or sensor dust? Spot removal in Lightroom covers healing and cloning by hand, and editing portraits in Lightroom puts skin work in the context of a whole portrait edit.
Read color with the Vectorscope
The Vectorscope is a round graph of every color in the photo. The angle around the circle is hue; the distance from the centre is saturation. Neutral whites, greys and blacks sit at the centre, and six markers around the edge show red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. A diagonal line with a shaded band marks where natural skin tones usually fall.
To open it, right-click the Histogram in the Develop module and choose Show Vectorscope (choose it again to go back). It updates live as you edit. Inside the Masking panel, hovering over the photo shows where the color under the pointer lands on the graph, which is the quickest way to check one patch of skin.
How to use it:
- Skin tones: the cluster from a face should sit along the skin line. If it swings toward magenta or toward green, the skin has a cast, even when your screen or your eyes have adapted to it.
- Color casts: something you know is neutral, a grey wall or white shirt, should sit at the centre. A cluster pulled off-centre shows the direction of the cast, and correcting white balance should pull it back.
- Saturation: a cluster that reaches far toward the edge warns you that a color may be too strong to print or to look natural.
Right-click the Vectorscope to change two settings. Preview Color Space sets which space it plots in: sRGB (web and most screens), Adobe RGB (often used for print), Display P3 (many modern phones and monitors), Rec. 2020 (HDR and video) or ProPhoto (very wide, used for editing and archiving). Orientation switches between Standard, with red near the top, and Right-origin, rotated about 90 degrees to match many video editing apps.
Not sure why a graph beats your eyes for this? Color casts explains why we stop seeing them, and color spaces explains what sRGB, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto actually are.
Fix stretched faces with the Projection slider
A wide-angle lens stretches whatever sits near the edges and corners of the frame. In a group photo the people at the ends look wider than those in the middle; in a close selfie, a face near the edge looks pulled. The new Projection slider is aimed squarely at this. It is the first slider in the Transform panel, above Vertical.
Adobe’s advice for the whole Transform panel applies: first open Lens Corrections and tick Enable Profile Corrections, because Lightroom analyses perspective better once the lens’s own distortion is removed. Then choose an Upright mode if the photo needs one, and use Projection to bring stretched shapes at the edges back toward natural proportions. Corrections like these can pull blank white areas in from the edges; tick Constrain Crop to crop them away automatically.
The Upright modes themselves are unchanged, and worth knowing:
- Level fixes tilted horizontals; Vertical fixes leaning verticals.
- Auto balances both while keeping as much of the image as possible; Full applies level, vertical and auto corrections together.
- Guided lets you draw two or more lines along edges that should be straight, and transforms the photo as soon as the second is drawn. Use it when the automatic modes pick the wrong lines.
Choosing an Upright mode resets the crop and any Transform settings already applied. Hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) while you click the mode to keep them.
Want to know why the stretching happens in the first place? Perspective distortion explains it, and the Transform tool covers every slider in the panel in more depth.
Clear history steps to shrink the catalog
Every slider move is stored in the catalog as a history step. Years of editing add up to millions of them, and a large catalog is slower to back up and to optimize. Lightroom Classic 16.0 lets you clear history in bulk without changing how any photo looks; the current settings always stay.
Select photos in Grid view or the filmstrip, then right-click and choose Clear History Steps (or use the Photo menu in Library, the Develop menu in Develop). Two choices:
- Clear Develop History Steps Except Last removes the editing steps but keeps the latest step and the milestones: Import, Export, Print and Publish.
- Clear All History Steps Except Last removes everything, milestones included, except the most recent step.
You can also right-click a folder (its subfolders are included) or a collection, smart collection or collection set. Published collections are excluded. A confirmation shows how many photos are affected, and Ctrl+Z or Command+Z brings the steps back if you undo straight away.
For automatic cleanup, open Catalog Settings, go to the Metadata tab and find History Step Cleanup. It can run when Lightroom next relaunches, every time it launches, once a week or once a month (the default is Never), clearing steps Older than a period you choose or Beyond the last number of steps. The latest step and milestone steps are always kept. Lightroom optimizes the catalog on quit after clearing 100 or more steps; you can also run File > Optimize Catalog yourself.
Before clearing, decide whether any old step is worth keeping. Once cleared, you cannot step back to it. Save any version you might want again as a snapshot first (right-click the step and choose Create Snapshot). And back up the catalog before any bulk operation on it.
Planning to move or back up the catalog while you are tidying it? Moving your Lightroom catalog and photos covers it without breaking the links to your files, and the photo backup guide covers the rest of the archive.
New cameras and lenses, and what to do when yours is missing
Each release adds raw support for new cameras and correction profiles for new lenses. This one adds raw support for the wide and ultrawide cameras of a new phone, and 13 lens profiles, among them lenses from Sony, Sigma, Tamron, Laowa and Apple. Adobe’s supported camera list gives, for every camera, the minimum version of Camera Raw, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic that opens its raw files; Lightroom Classic 16.0 matches Camera Raw 19.0.
If Lightroom Classic will not open the raw files from a new camera, there are two ways through:
- Update Lightroom Classic. New camera support only ever arrives in new versions.
- If you cannot update, use Adobe’s free DNG Converter. It always carries the latest camera support and turns the raw files into DNG files that older versions of Lightroom can open.
Lens profiles correct barrel and pincushion distortion and, for most lenses, vignetting. Turn them on in the Develop module under Lens Corrections with Enable Profile Corrections, and tick Remove Chromatic Aberration while you are there. Some profiles work only on raw files, not on JPEG, PNG or TIFF. If your lens has no profile, the Manual tab still lets you correct distortion and vignetting by eye.
Not sure what those corrections are actually fixing? Lens distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration each explain one of them, and DNG explains the file format the converter produces.
Common mistakes with the new tools
- Formatting the card after a filtered import. The frames you filtered out were never copied. Check before you format.
- Trusting a generated depth map without looking. Tick Show Depth Map before you adjust, and fix bad edges with Subtract.
- Too much glow. If it is the first thing anyone notices, halve the Amount.
- Removing every freckle and mole. Natural Marks is a separate slider so you can leave a face looking like its owner.
- Reading the Vectorscope in the wrong color space. Set Preview Color Space to where the photo is going: sRGB for screens, the print space for print.
- Clearing history you needed. Make snapshots of versions you might want again, and back up the catalog first.
- Using Projection before profile corrections. Remove the lens’s own distortion first, then correct what remains.
- Expecting Focus Points on every file. It needs original raw files from a Canon, Nikon or Sony camera that records autofocus data.
Try this: one photo, five new tools, ten minutes
Pick a raw portrait taken outdoors, ideally with a light source or bright sky behind the person, from a Canon, Nikon or Sony camera if you have one.
- In Library, right-click and choose Show Autofocus Points. Note where the red box sits. Is it on the nearest eye?
- In Develop, right-click the Histogram and show the Vectorscope. In Masking, hover over the cheek and see where it lands against the skin line. Nudge white balance until it sits on the line.
- Run blemish removal. Set Blemishes high and Natural Marks low, then use Refine and Restore on any mark that belongs to the face.
- Make a Depth Range mask on the background. Check the depth map, then give the background a small cool tint in its Color Grading section.
- Add Bloom glow to the whole photo, then lower the Amount until you only notice it when you toggle Effects off and on.
Judge the result by comparing before and after (press \). The face should look like the same person on a good day, the skin should read as natural on the scope, and the background should sit a little further back than it did. If anything looks edited, it is overdone.
Questions about Lightroom Classic 16
Is Lightroom Classic 16 a free update?
It comes as an update for anyone with a current Creative Cloud plan that includes Lightroom Classic. Update it from the Creative Cloud desktop app. The older perpetual-licence Lightroom versions do not receive new features or camera support.
Do I need to convert my old edits to use the new tools?
No. Existing edits are untouched. The new tools appear as soon as you open a photo, and things like Glow, Color Grading in masks and Projection are added on top of what is already there.
Why is Show Autofocus Points greyed out?
The photo has no autofocus data Lightroom can read. That happens with JPEGs, with cameras from brands other than Canon, Nikon and Sony, with Smart Previews and DNG proxies, and with some files converted to DNG. Open the original raw file to check.
Does Depth Range work on JPEG files and scans?
Adobe says Lightroom Classic now generates a depth map for photos that have no depth information, without limiting it to raw files. How good the map is depends on the picture: clear foreground and background layers map well, flat scenes and fine detail less so. Check it with Show Depth Map.
Will clearing history steps change my photos?
No. The current settings of every photo are kept exactly. What you lose is the ability to step back through the cleared history, so save any version you want as a snapshot before you clear.
My new camera’s raw files will not open. What now?
Check that Lightroom Classic is up to date, since support for each camera arrives in a specific version. If you cannot update, convert the files with Adobe’s free DNG Converter and import the DNGs.
Looking for tutorials on the tools that did not change, from presets to panoramas? The Lightroom tutorials page gathers them in one place.