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Top 10 New Features in Lightroom in 2025! But are they any good?
I'm diving into Lightroom’s newest 2025 features — but instead of covering everything, I’m focusing only on the tools I actually used in real photo edits. From AI culling to improved denoise, dust removal, tourist removal, landscape masking, and color variants, I’ll show you what truly made a difference in my workflow. No fluff, just real‑world results.
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► CHAPTERS
00:00 - Introduction
00:45 - Assisted Culling
04:10 - New Denoise
06:23 - Remove Dust Spots
07:15 - Remove Distractions
09:05 - Landscape Masking
11:03 - Color Variance
12:46 - HDR Workflow
13:44 - Color Labels
16:16 - Batch Renaming
17:50 - Bugs & Feature Requests
20:29 - Conclusion: Are these gimmicks?
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Hello everyone. Lightroom has added so many new features this year, including a lot of AI ones. [music] But are they only gimmicks or some bloat? Let's discover the features I actually used to edit my photos that were added to Lightroom in 2025. For those of you new to this channel, I'm Len Mahford, a young photographer filmmaker on journey to become better at this art. This is not meant to be an in-depth review of every single new features I have for Lightroom. this would take way too much time inside of this video. Instead, it's only going to be the features I actually used to edit my photos in the last few months. I'll also talk at the very end about some of the bugs that are inside of Lightroom that are quite frustrating right now and some [music] of the features I really want to see in the future. So, let's jump into Lightroom right now and look at the first feature. And this one is assisted culling. So, I've tested a bunch of different other apps that allow to call photos in the past, but they're usually not the best for different types of scenarios because they're really meant to be specifically for scenarios like weddings or events where you can really have clear faces and you're really looking at people. So, for an example here, we can come inside of this. These are photos of me at one of my friends wedding earlier this year. And one of my friends are taking the photos, but he's not the best photographer and tends to go all around with the camera. [music] So, tend to get a lot of blurry shots that are not necessarily the best ones. So assistant culling is going to be great here because you can come here and select different options. I can say do I want to my subject to be in focus. And here the good thing with Lightroom is the subject doesn't need to be a person necessarily. It could be something else in the shot. Then we're going to look at eye focus. We're going to look at do you want the eyes to be in focus or not. And then we're going to look at if you want the eyes to be open. Uh and you get really the control here to decide what is important for you inside of these types of photos. Then you can look at here and remove and reject misfires and also reject any photos with exposure issues that won't be easily fixed. And if you look at the bottom here, we now have 39 selects. We have 21 rejects and we can see all the photos. If we play with these sliders here, so for example, if I want to say I want to have the subject more in focus, I want to have the eyes to be in focus. We can really play and get a better select. So if you look at some of the results right here, we can see that most of the photos it's selected. I'm nice in focus. There's nothing [music] blurry. And if you look at the rejected shots, we can see that the inverse is actually true. They're all pretty blurry shot. So, they did a pretty good job here at selecting some of the shots. Now, the next step is deciding what you're going to do with these results. And here, we're going to come here inside of the batch actions. And you get to decide what you want to do and how you want to flag the ones you want to keep or reject. So, you can apply some flags, you can apply rating, you can apply label, you can add to an an album, you can decide to do nothing. And for the rejects, you can also decide to delete the photos from Lightroom. For me, what I really like doing is actually selecting a label here. So, we're going to select green for the ones I'm going to keep. And we're going to select read about the other ones. I'm going to come back to labels a little bit later. But these are very powerful new features. So, if you click on here, okay, we're going to see it after a few seconds. If you come here, we can see all the photos in red are the ones that we decide to reject and all the green ones are the ones we decided to keep. Also, if you want to use the filter option here, you can come in the cooling score and you still have access to all this information. So, you can take the ones with only the best uh focus here. So, you can decide which are the ones here and really try and find the best photos using this AI calling method, which is very useful. Now, if you look on an example that actually doesn't work, it's not great with anything else that's not a person or a type of event. So, if we come here and we look at these photos I had from France and we go in the coloring options here, we're going to do the same thing. subject focus. Uh there's not really people, so I don't really care about the people. But if we look at the rejects right away, it's rejecting a bunch of photos here [music] uh with the Eiffel Tower in the background. And what is very interesting is if we open the photo here and we go in the information, we're going to see that it's rejecting it because it thinks that my subject is out of focus because of the leaves in the front here. So clearly this system is still not tuned for things that are not necessarily people or different types of scenes that are more similar to that. It did work in some of my other landscapes, which was pretty good. Um, but it really doesn't like these more artsy types of shots. So, it's still not trusted to uh select all the best photos from a trip or something like that currently. Now, let's talk about the second feature, and this is the noise. Yes, you might mention that the noise existed [music] in the past, but it was really improved in the last year. If we look at a photo right here, this is a photo I would have never actually edited in the past because the noise is just too awful. But now if we come to settings here and we go down, we can select the D noiseis option here and it's now a setting inside of the menu. Instead of creating a brand new edit, we're going to be able to apply it and then edit it and retain our edits with it. So just wait a few more seconds for [music] it to apply the new D noiseis setting. So now if you want to tweak the D [music] noiseis instead of having to go inside of the menu and regenerate a new photo, we can simply come here and slide the slider to apply less D noise or more D noise if we want on the other side. I think this one is a little bit too much. But if we go somewhere around probably like 30 something like that, it's really good. But the real reason why this has been a lifesaver is not about this. It's actually if we come right here and we go on the first photo here. These are shots I took the other day with my Fujifilm XT50 an APS-C sensor. And if you look at the information here, we're going to see that noise is actually pretty high. So it's at 125800 [music] on APS-C sensor. So the noise is pretty not usable in the end here. So if you look at the photo here again, we can come here and we can apply the D noiseis setting. But the big difference [music] here is that I'm going to be able to copy paste these settings afterwards. So again, let's just wait a few seconds for this to be applied. So now if I come here and I go inside of my edit settings, I [music] can come here and I can go inside of the details. Let's actually do none. Inside of the details here, we're going to select the D noiseise option. And now we can simply go on the next shots here. And we can simply apply them. And it's going to automatically apply this D noiseis to the next shots. And now if I have multiple photos, I can also come here, select all the photos, and do Ctrl +V and paste the settings here. and it's gonna apply the D noiseis to all the photos. This has been a lifesaver and really allowed me to take some photos in situations where I wouldn't in the past or with a camera that I wouldn't trust to get good photos in the first place in a harder situation like this where there wasn't a ton of lighting. So, this is an amazing new feature inside of Lightroom. Now, let's look at the next new feature and this is remove dust spots. I don't think most people realize how annoying this can be when you have photos and bags and you have too many dust spots. For this example here, I quickly changed my lens and because of doing that, I had a bunch of snow that came in on my sensor and really affected it. If we look at here, it took me hours to remove all the dust spots on different shots. If we see here, there's hundreds of dust spots that removed inside of this photo. So now, if we actually remove this, we can actually just remove all this. We see all of the really dark ones here, all of the dark spots on the side here. But now we simply have to come down here, click on apply and dust, wait a few seconds, and voila, it's done. If we toggle on here, we're going to see it detected almost as many dust spots as I did and did a really good job of removing them, which is really useful and a huge timesaver. The next option is very similar to the remove dust spot, but this one is actually to remove the pesky tourist inside of shots instead of removing some dust spots on the sensor. So, if we come here, we can go inside of our remove tool and we can go inside of the people option and it's going to detect the scene right here and find all the people inside of our shot. And now we can click remove and bam, the people are gone inside of the shot. If you realize it did detect that my girlfriend was here and they didn't remove her, but they removed everybody else in the background. If you're not satisfied with one of the results here, you can come here and see the different versions they generated and find something that works a little bit better. So, I actually think here the first one was actually pretty good. I think I like that one. But any of the one here that they removed, you can come here and make sure you have the correct one [music] that makes the shot look natural. Now, if you go on the next shot here, this is gets a little bit more complex and it doesn't always work as well in more complex scenarios. So, if you come here, we're going to still select the detect people here and we can see here that it detected some of the people in the foreground. So, let's see how this one works. So, we can select remove and it did actually pretty decent job here. I actually think this photo looks a lot better. If you look at before and after, it actually makes this shot a lot nicer. The shot before I probably would have deleted them, but this one I can actually keep it around. Now, I want to show an example where I actually know it will not work. And if you look at this shot here, and let's say I want to remove everybody down here. This is really going to struggle because it has a really hard time understanding what is the street, what are the different buildings, how to reconstruct all of that. So, it's not a magic tool. It won't be able to solve all the issues. Uh, but yeah, it works kind of, but if you look at the bottom of the street here, the path is supposed to go down. It's making the buildings a little bit weird here. So, no, it's not going to be perfect in all scenarios, but for a landscape or something like that where you have annoying tourists. Now, you can get rid of them with one click. How cool is that? When they announced this next feature, I was really excited about it because this is one of the tools I use the most inside of Lightroom and one of the reasons why I mostly stick to Lightroom for most of my edits. And this is the new masking tools for landscape. So if you come in a photo right here, we used to able to use some options like the object mask to select the mountains or things like that. But now we can simply come inside of the landscape option and it will detect a bunch of different parts of the image automatically. So here we're detected the sky. So if you look at here, we can see the sky, we can see the mountain and it even [music] detected snow inside of the shot. So if you select the mountain and the snow, it will actually create two separate mask or we can select to create only a single mask using both. I want to have two mask. So, we're going to select both of them together here. Now, if we let it process a little bit, it's going to create a mask right here. And we can, let's say, add a little bit of contrast inside of our mountain here. We might want to add a little bit of texture. And then if we go on the snow, snow can be very tricky because sometimes it's a bit too white. Sometimes it's not quite white enough. Uh, so here we can adjust these things like that. So now we can make it a little bit wider if I wanted to or I can bring it down. I can really adjust different parts of the shots. But it doesn't stop there. So now it also suggests vegetation on this shot. So, we can select vegetation here. We're also going to do snow and mountain and sky. And we're going to create all of these masks. And if I come to the vegetation mask here, I can play just specifically with these. So, I could maybe make them either more saturated or maybe less saturated or things like that very quickly. For this sunset shot, we're also going to have a new option we haven't seen in the other ones. And you can really see it adapts based on what is inside of the shot. So, here we have also water that appeared here and natural ground, which is the beach. Finally, the last one here is a slightly different one. So, if you look at the scene here with some water, some foliage in the front. Again, it does a really good job of separating all of these. We have mountains, we have vegetation, we have the water, and you can really tweak different parts of the shot very easily without having to use the object select or paint or things like that to select different parts of the image. This is so exciting. This next tool is not one that I understood right away why I would care using it, but after using a few times, it's actually a very powerful one. So, this is color variant. If you look at the shot right here, I think that my whole face is a little bit too pink. Uh, it doesn't look that good. It was very cold, so that's why my face was pretty pink, but I don't think it's the best look right here. So, if we come on the color point right here, and we select a color that's between the very dark pink and the lighter pink on my skin, I can select something like right here. Uh, we're going to go inside of range here and just make sure that we select as much of the pink in my face as possible. [music] Then we can come here in variance and we can either make my whole face a lot more pink everywhere and it's a very consistent pink which I don't really like. I'm [music] going to increase the variance. It's going to add more contrast in this color inside of here. Now it looks a lot more natural. It looks a lot more if I was just cool and I have this redness because of the cold. But now let's say I just want to make it a little bit less intense. I can come here and just remove a little bit of the saturation instead of this pink. And if you look at before, after my face looks a lot more natural now inside of this shot. Now, if you move to another example here, another great example here is using it for some skies or things like that. So, for example, here it's a very dark blue on one side and very pale blue on the other side. So, if we come here and we select the tool and we select the color right in the middle here, we can then go do the same thing and make sure that we have our range here that is selecting the whole sky. So, we want to select everything except the building. And if we come here, we can actually do variance and we can either add more contrast and make this whole scene a lot more uh contrasty or we can do the inverse and make the whole colors blend a lot better. I kind of like the look here of a little bit more contrast instead of the sky. But it's a great way of tweaking these [music] types of colors. The next feature I want to talk about is not a new feature, but it's just a bunch of improvements they did for the HDR flow of pictures. I'm a big believer that the future of images is going to be HDR. Because if you come here on a photo and you enable HDR, you can see all the information that's going to be recovered inside of the brighter parts of the image. You might not see it here because I'm not sure that my recording software actually supports HDR. Uh but that's just something that will probably come later. Uh but if you can see it on the screen, it is kind of incredible how much you can recover. For example, this scene right here is kind of hard to edit this shot because there was so many brag parts inside of the sunset. But when we enable HDR, all of these colors really come to life and really pop. But now we have really good tools to get more range inside of our HDR brightness, we have really good tools to visualize how it's going to look out on the SDR display and tweak it here to make it look better on those displays. And I just think the whole flow got even better this year with a bunch of tweak they did. The next feature I want to talk about is one that has existed forever in Lightroom Classic and is color labels. We also quickly talked about it them earlier. It's a great way whenever you're using the culling options to be able to mark what was selected or rejected without having to set a rating or something like that because I usually tend to prefer doing it afterwards. But it can also be very useful if I want to say for example here I want to mark a few photos here. I want to say let's say the yellow ones are going to be the ones that I'm going to publish on um social media. Or I could come here and mark a few ones here that I want to post uh on my website. I could also say they're like purple or green or something like that. Uh, and then we can have a different way of going through the photos and you can really decide how your own system will work. The next feature I want to talk about is actually one that I specifically asked for inside of their forums. So, I guess Lightroom was listening to me. But no, more seriously, a bunch of other people also asked for the same feature. So, I'm very glad that they listened to us and they added it. About 2 years ago, they added this new feature here where you can right click on an album and archive it locally. So, it's basically allow you to move all the original files with their edits to local storage. So, in the background right here, I have a NAS device. And that basically gives me terabytes and terabytes of storage. So, whenever I'm done editing the photos in Lightroom, I want to move them from the cloud locally so I can archive them, but I still want to be able to edit them if I need to. We can select where we're going to save them to. We can decide if we want to keep the file structure from Lightroom or not. [music] And then once it's done, it's going to move them locally. And we can see here we have the photos right here. If we quickly look through the photos, we can see that we have the photos and we can still edit them if we need to right here. Up to now, this was working. This always worked. I really like that. But the big issue was how to navigate those different files. So, if we came here on a top level folder, it would show us a blank page and tell us we had to choose another folder, which was really annoying. There was no way of really finding stuff inside [music] of here. What we can do now is actually come at the top here and click this little button here, include subfolder. And we can see everything inside of the subfolders which allows to much more quickly go through all the different photos inside of folder. It might not seem like much but the difference here is if we look at the photos here. For example, this folder right here. If I used to have to look at the photos [music] and search photos, I had to go through every single one of these folders here until I found the photo I wanted it for. Where [music] now I can simply click on April and see all of the photos inside of April. And this is going to save me hours when I'm searching for files inside of Lightrooms uh and I want to find specific files for my photos and family photos. The last feature I want to talk about is one that is very niche and most people probably will never use but for someone like me it will save me hours of work in the end and it's basically being able to batch rename some files. That might be pretty boring but if we come here and we select all the files here I have a mix of photos from my Fujifilm camera and my Google Pixel camera. So, if we come here, we can actually go inside of our photo options [music] and then find the rename photos here. And it's going to bring up the new batch edit thing. At the beginning, when you look at this, it doesn't seem that special. There's a few options here, but what is very powerful is if you come here, you can create a new template and you can basically do whatever you want. So, you can do very simple thing here. So, let's say we're going to set it up for having the date. So, I've added the date, the hours, the minute, the seconds. But the real reason why I'm so excited about this one is the next part right here. So if we come here and we go meta dada, we have access to all the information about here. So I can tag which camera was being used. Then I [music] could tag information like let's say what shutter speed. So I've come back to meta here and look at the shutter speed. So now I've added a bunch of information here. So we have the camera shutter speed, lens, focal length, aperture, ISO and all of these are very important for me because once I rename all of these files, it's going to allow me once I start editing the video to very quickly find information about the files. But what's even cooler is then afterwards I can extract information from the file names. So in my videos I'll be able to very quickly add information about the ISO, shutter speeds and things like that and automatically show them. I used to have to manually enter all that information and it was really painful. So I'm very excited that we can extract all of that and create custom names. Now let's talk about some of the issues that Lightroom has and things I would really want them to improve. First of all, photos that are now important from my Sony camera don't show up with the Sony profiles right here. Uh, I can select them manually, but they won't automatically put the one that the camera selected, which is kind of annoying because sometimes I see colors on my cameras that will be different inside of the software here. So, I really hope they fix this bug. It has been reported. I know they're aware of it and hopefully it's going to be fixed pretty soon. Another thing I think that really needs to be improved is the assisted color culling. Yes, it does work pretty well for some scenarios, but I think that it would be a lot better if it could also work for other types of scenarios. So for landscapes, for cityscapes, for all kinds of other types of photography, this is still way too focused on photographers that are doing weddings or those types of events where I would really like that they could quickly go through my photos and tell me which ones are good or not. Now, the feature I really really want would actually be a autoedit function that works by learning whatever I'm doing and then applying those to my photos based on my edits, how I edited the photos in the past. because I've edited tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of photos inside of Lightroom. So, they should know how I edit. And if I could come inside of an album, apply the edits automatically, and have the auto setting apply my edits, how I edit photos, not how the software thinks most people edit photos, it would be really great because then I could just go through the photos, clicky tweak what I need, and get better results a lot faster. I think this would be a real gamecher feature inside of Lightroom if you could just come here, click the auto button and get really good results without having to do too much to the photos. Oh, another quick thing you need to fix here is whenever you're using the adaptive color and you try applying auto setting, there's [music] currently a message that appears. This is super annoying. I think adaptive profiles and auto setting should work hands in hand and they should also add support for HDR processing inside of the auto setting. I really feel that like this is going to be something that's going to be fixed in 2026. So fingers crossed that all of this gets better next year. The last little thing I would really want them [music] to fix is that inside of the local options here, uh if you apply some more advanced settings like some AI edits or things like [music] that, they don't save any of that information inside of the XMP file. So it's really annoying when you come back. You have to regenerate all of these things afterwards, which can be really annoying. I really hope that in [music] the future they can save all of that so the workflow when using local files can be much more efficient. I know they want us to buy more cloud storage, but sometimes I just need to go back to some old photos and quickly reedit them and having to regenerate all the AI effects is really really annoying and I really hope they fix that one. Now let's answer the question I first asked inside of this video which was are these features bloat or simply gimmicks? In my opinion absolutely not. I think Lightroom is one of the rare software where they add AI features that are truly empowering you to become a better photographer and not trying to take your task. They're not trying to edit your photos for you. They're simply adding tools where some of the tasks were very tedious in the past and would require extra software to get it done where now you can get stuff like removing dust, removing people from your shots with a simple click. And this is very powerful because this can save hours when you're photo editing your shots and even fix photos that were impossible to fix before like with D noiseis and things like that. So, in my opinion, all of these new features they added are actually a huge game changer inside of Lightroom and not at all something that is a gimmick or simply bloat [music] inside of a program. Now, if you enjoyed this video, please let me know by hitting the like button below and definitely subscribe for more content on photography and film making. See you in the next one.
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What is this video about?
Lightroom shipped a ton of new features this year, and I wanted to cut through the noise and focus on what actually helped my workflow. So I spent the last few months testing the tools that seemed most promising, and I'm sharing my honest take on which ones are genuinely useful and which ones... well, let's just say they're still works in progress.
Assisted Culling turned out to be a real timesaver for event and portrait work. You can dial in what matters to you—subject focus, eye focus, exposure—and it does a solid job flagging keepers versus rejects. That said, it stumbles with landscapes and artistic shots, so it's not a catch-all solution yet.
The new denoise has been a genuine lifesaver. The game-changer isn't just that it works better; it's that you can now copy and paste denoise settings across multiple photos, and you can adjust the strength after applying it. This opened up shots I would've trashed in the past because of high ISO.
Dust removal and tourist removal are both one-click wonders that save hours. Dust spots that used to take me forever to manually clone away are gone in seconds. People removal works great in simpler scenes, though it struggles with complex backgrounds.
Landscape masking is easily my favorite new addition. It automatically detects sky, mountains, vegetation, water, snow—whatever's in your shot—and creates individual masks for each element. No more wrestling with object selection or brush tools.
Color Variance lets you select a specific color range and adjust its saturation and contrast independently. I used it to fix my face looking too pink in cold weather, and it's equally powerful for tweaking skies and other color-heavy areas.
I also touched on improvements to HDR workflows, the (finally!) useful batch rename feature with metadata extraction, color labels, and archive functionality. Honestly, these aren't gimmicks. They're real productivity gains that either save time on tedious tasks or unlock photos I couldn't salvage before.
That said, there's room to grow. The Sony color profile import isn't working properly yet, assisted culling needs expansion beyond events, and I'd kill for an auto-edit function that learns from my editing style rather than applying generic adjustments.