Hello creative friends,
Even though most of my work is illustration-based, Lightroom is essential for capturing reference photos like coastal rides, beach textures, and lighting studies. The MAX 2025 updates make it even more useful.
What’s new in Lightroom
- AI Dust Removal detects and removes dust spots automatically across batches of images.
- People Distraction Removal removes unwanted people from photos without residual ghosting.
- Reflection Removal allows you to slide and select the amount of reflection you want removed. It truly removes reflections instead of substituting content.
- Assistant Culling moves photos with eyes closed, poor exposure, or focus issues into a Reject folder for review. It can also stack visually similar images to simplify selection.
- Export Integration allows photos to be exported to Photoshop for edits like changing pose or direction and then brought back into Lightroom.
Why this matters
Shooting location photos for my illustration process becomes faster with these tools. Reflection and dust removal give clean reference visuals, and export integration with Photoshop streamlines the process of editing and compositing images.
What I’m going to try
- Run recent beach ride photos through Assistant Culling to compare speed and accuracy with manual selection.
- Use Reflection Removal on a shoreline photo and adjust for the best look before exporting to Photoshop for compositing.
- Build a workflow: capture textures → import to Lightroom → auto-cull → export to Photoshop → overlay illustration → back into Lightroom for color grading.
Bottom line
Even illustrators benefit from these updates, especially when using photography as reference or for licensing purposes. Smarter tools save time and allow more focus on creative work. Download the Lightroom Photo Magic Checklist to clean, cull, and prep your images faster than ever.
