As you know, I’m an avid Lightroom Classic user, utilizing it to manage and process my photos since the first version came out in 2007, just in time for me to get back into photography and start 75CentralPhotography.

Classic is critical to my workflow and have little-use for the Lightroom desktop cloud product and I try to evangelize the benefits of using Classic to manage your photographic assets whenever possible. I love the software and love helping others use it.

That said, it’s not without its faults. It’s an older codebase, so it can be slow on under-powered computers. Its interface isn’t super-intuitive and there is a lot of things that can be overwhelming to a new user. It’s also missing some key features that I hope Adobe will add in future versions.

I’ve listed my most-wanted items below and intend for this to be a “living document” that I can add to over time (and, hopefully, remove from).

• Rename Lightroom Classic to just “Lightroom” or “Lightroom Pro” and the Lightroom cloud-based product to “Literoom”. There’s so much confusion with the naming conventions Adobe has used over the years. Lightroom, Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic, Lightroom Desktop, Lightroom and so on. As Classic is aimed at pros with pro-workflow items (robust local storage, soft-proofing, printing, etc.) whereas the cloud-based product lacks a lot of features and is aimed at more-casual users, I suggest renaming as described.
• Sky replacement without having to roundtrip to Photoshop. Better yet, incorporate AI with Sky Replacement in Lightroom so I can describe the sky I want as well as using my own sky photos.
• Generative Expand, again without having to roundtrip to Photoshop.
• The ability to merge or intersect two or more separate sets of masks.
• A structure slider…texture and clarity are close, but not quite like what other apps do with structure.
• AI Denoise for other file types besides raw files.
• Improved color science to bring it more inline with Capture One’s color science.
• A midtones slider. You can sort-of cleverly do this by using the Luminance slider in the midtones section of the Color Grading tool, so obviously the code for this exists…just separate it out as another slider in the Basic panel along with the other tone sliders.
• AI Dehaze.
• Now that we finally have search in presets, let’s have search in profiles as well.
• Automated electric wire removal.
• Improvements to Generative Remove that don’t result in weird areas of the sky when removing electric wires manually or other artifacts.
• The ability to add prompts to Generative Remove.