Adobe Lightroom

Every adjustment is stored as a recipe, not baked into the file, so you can revisit a crop or a grade months later. Originals sit in Adobe's cloud photo storage and edits travel with them. Open the same photo on a phone in the morning and on a desktop at night, and you see the same version. Smart previews let you keep working on a laptop when the connection drops, and changes merge when it returns.

Masking used to mean brushing around a hairline by hand. Lightroom now detects a subject, a sky, or individual people and builds the mask for you. Portrait masks split out facial skin, body skin, eyebrows, eyes, lips, teeth, and hair as separate selectable areas. Adobe says the detection runs on-device where possible, which keeps masking fast during a long cull.

The Remove tool pairs a brush with Firefly generative fill. You paint over a distraction, and the model rebuilds what should be behind it. Reflection Removal targets windows, glass, and water, and the September 2026 update cut down the smearing that made tricky surfaces look painted over. People Removal handles bystanders in the background. Every generative pass takes a few seconds and needs a connection.

Added in the version 9.6 update, Prompt to Edit turns a written request into an edit. You describe the result, or pick one of the built-in example prompts, and Lightroom applies the adjustment. Adobe credits the Nano Banana model for the feature. It's aimed at restorations and quick retouching rather than precise local work, and results still need a check at full resolution.

Adaptive presets read the photo and adjust their own settings, so a portrait preset changes exposure and white balance for each frame instead of applying one fixed recipe. Lens Blur fakes shallow depth of field with an adjustable focus range, and it ships with background blur presets. Denoise cleans up high-ISO RAW files, and Super Resolution doubles the pixel dimensions of a crop. All three are GPU-heavy.

The web app runs the full editing panel in a browser, which is useful on a borrowed machine or a Chromebook. Albums can be shared as public galleries with download, favorites, and proofing options. Photographers use this instead of sending a folder of JPEGs, and clients comment on individual frames without an account.