Adobe Lightroom Classic 15.6.0

Lightroom Classic is the hub for photographers who think in folders and hard drives, not cloud libraries. Let's walk through one grounded task: taking a set of bracketed landscape shots through to a polished image.

From import to a finished HDR panorama

1. Import from a local folder. Lightroom Classic references photos where they live on your Mac rather than moving them into a package, so your folder structure stays yours.
2. Cull with flags. In the Library module, pick the keepers and reject the blurry frames before you spend any time editing.
3. Merge each bracket to HDR. Select the dark, middle and bright exposures and choose Photo Merge > HDR. HDR, or high dynamic range, simply means blending several exposures so both the bright sky and the dark foreground hold detail.
4. Stitch the results into a panorama. Select the merged files and choose Photo Merge > Panorama to get a single wide image.
5. Refine the crop. Version 15.5 lets you adjust the opacity of the cropped-out area, so you can see what you are trimming away without toggling the overlay.
6. Shape the light with masks. The new Feather and Edge controls soften a local adjustment so a lift in exposure looks like natural light rather than a cut-out shape.

The whole process stays non-destructive and tied to your folders: every edit is an instruction stored alongside the original file, ready to be revisited later.

Let me talk you through a typical working session, because the feature list only tells half the story. You've just come back from a morning shoot — a couple of hundred raw files from a woodland walk, shot on an overcast day that kept changing its mind about the light. The card goes into the reader and Lightroom Classic opens to the Library module.

Unplug your drive and keep editing via smart previews

You start the import and tick Build Smart Previews. This takes a few minutes but means you can unplug the external drive later and keep editing from a lightweight proxy. While the import churns, you scan the thumbnails filling the grid and flag the obvious misses — the frame where the bird left, the one where the autofocus grabbed a branch instead of the bark texture you wanted. By the time the import finishes, the first cull is done.

You switch to the Develop module and pick a keeper with promise: a close-up of moss on a fallen trunk. The white balance is a touch cool. You grab the eyedropper and click a neutral grey patch on the bark — the whole image warms into something truer to the morning you remember. A gentle S-curve in the tone panel, a bump to clarity, and you mask the moss itself with a brush, lifting the exposure just there. The new feather control in version 15.5 means that lift bleeds softly into the surrounding wood, no hard edge in sight.

You sync those settings across three similar frames, then move on to the next batch. An hour passes without you leaving the keyboard. The catalog, by the way, is the database that holds every edit, keyword and collection — it lives alongside your photos, not inside them, and it is the reason you can search for "moss, close-up, flagged" two years later and find the shot in seconds.

Turn off the sharpening preset that runs on every import

Out of the box, Lightroom Classic makes assumptions that suit a general workflow. A few tweaks early on will save you friction every session thereafter.

Turn off the default sharpening on import. Head to Preferences > Presets and set the raw default to "Camera Settings" rather than "Adobe Default". Adobe's default applies a capture sharpening and some colour adjustments before you have even looked at the image. Starting from the camera's own profile gives you a truer baseline, especially if you have tuned your in-camera picture style.

Set the external editor. If you round-trip files to Photoshop or Affinity Photo, go to Preferences > External Editing and set the file format to TIFF, 16-bit, ProPhoto RGB. The default compression and colour space are lossy-minded, and a good TIFF preserves everything the raw file offers for the return journey.

Adjust the preview size. In Catalog Settings > File Handling, set the standard preview size to match your display's longest edge. If you are on a 27-inch iMac, that is at least 2560 pixels. The default 1440 pixels forces the app to re-render every time you go full-screen in Loupe view, and you feel that as a stutter.

Enable GPU acceleration for export. In Preferences > Performance, choose "Custom" for the GPU and tick the export box. This was a quiet addition a few versions back, and it can halve the time a large batch takes to write to disk.

Deliver a hundred corporate headshots in under ninety minutes

Imagine someone who shoots a hundred headshot-style portraits at a corporate event, all under the same ballroom lighting. They have ninety minutes between the last click and the client's deadline for a gallery. Their card holds a mix of raw files shot at ISO 1600 and a handful where the flash didn't fire.

They import into a dated folder on the working SSD, applying a metadata preset that stamps copyright and contact details into every file. In the Library module, they filter by lens metadata to isolate frames shot on the 85mm, then tag the best expression from each subject with a colour label. A quick pass with the Auto Tone button on one well-exposed frame gives a starting point; they copy that setting and paste it across the entire labelled set. From there, it is batch-sync for white balance and a slight luminance noise reduction — ISO 1600 on the sensor they use needs it — followed by a crop to 4:5 for the client's web layout. Export as JPEG at 2048 pixels on the long edge, sRGB, and the whole set is in a Dropbox folder before the coffee goes cold.

What matters here is not any single editing trick but the chain of decisions that keeps the mouse still and the brain ahead of the clock. Lightroom Classic rewards that mindset: the catalog filters, the sync engine, and the export presets all remove steps when you set them up once and reuse them under pressure.

It stops feeling heavy on an M2 Mac with 16 GB of memory

Lightroom Classic has a reputation for being heavy, and on older Intel machines that reputation is earned. On an Apple Silicon Mac — particularly an M2 or later with 16 GB or more of memory — the story is different. Import and preview generation now run with a quiet competence that makes the spinning beachball a rare sight. The GPU acceleration, once an experimental checkbox, is now mature enough that the Develop sliders feel direct, like adjusting a physical dial rather than waiting for a screen redraw.

Memory use sits around 3 to 6 GB for a medium catalog of 40,000 images, though it will climb when you batch-merge HDR or panorama sets. The catalog itself stays responsive even on a mechanical external drive, but the 1:1 preview cache belongs on an SSD if you want quick zooming into full-resolution detail. Stability has been solid through the 15.x cycle; the only crash I have reproduced reliably involves unplugging a drive while a big import is writing, and that is hardly a surprise for any database-backed application.

One honest note: the face detection and auto-tagging feature, while improved, still chews background CPU cycles for a long while on a first run. If you do not need it, disable it in Catalog Settings and reclaim the processor for editing.

A full workflow: restoring an old scanned print

Let's walk through a complete task that uses tools beyond the everyday sliders. A friend hands you a TIFF scan of a family photograph from the 1970s. It is faded, dust-spotted, and the colour has drifted towards magenta over the decades. You are going to bring it back without leaving Lightroom Classic.

Step one: crop and straighten. The scan includes the white border of the print, which throws off the tone adjustments. You crop inside to the image area, using the new opacity control in version 15.5 to see exactly where the picture edge falls against the border. A quick drag on the angle slider squares the horizon.

Step two: set the black and white points. Hold Option (or Alt) and drag the Blacks slider left until the first true black pixels appear as tiny specks in the overlay. Do the same for Whites. This stretches the faded tonal range back across the full histogram without clipping anything important.

Step three: colour cast correction. The white balance eyedropper finds nothing reliable in an old print, so you open the Calibration panel — an underused section tucked below the main sliders — and pull the Blue Primary hue gently towards green to counteract the magenta drift. A small move here does more than a global tint adjustment.

Step four: spot removal. Zoom to 100% and press Q for the Spot Removal tool. The dust specks are numerous but small. Set the tool to Heal rather than Clone, and work in rows across the image, letting the tool sample from clean areas nearby. This is methodical work, and the feathering built into the heal algorithm keeps the repairs invisible.

Step five: local sharpening. A global sharpen would exaggerate the paper texture and the scanner noise. Instead, you paint a mask with the brush tool — set to a low flow of 30 — over the eyes, mouth and jewellery, then apply sharpening and a touch of clarity only within that mask. The background stays soft and natural.

Step six: output. The restored scan is destined for a photobook, so you export a full-resolution TIFF in Adobe RGB. For a version to share online, you create a second export preset that downsamples to 2400 pixels on the long edge, converts to sRGB, and applies output sharpening for screen. Both files carry the same catalog edits, just different final forms.

The pleasure of this workflow is that at no point did you need another application. What began as a faded, magenta-tinted print ends as a clean, warm image ready for print and screen, and every adjustment remains non-destructive in the catalog, ready for a different treatment next year if the photobook design changes.

Adobe has issued a maintenance update for Lightroom Classic, concentrating on behind-the-scenes reliability work and small performance tweaks.

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
• Architecture: Apple Silicon (native) or Intel 64‑bit