On November 10, 2026, Adobe announced Lightroom Classic 16.0. The version brings an AI tool that detects blemishes, moles and freckles, and AI-calculated depth maps that you use to select foreground and background for masks.
The announcement says nothing about price, plan, regions and languages. It also remains unclear whether the AI features consume credits and whether they compute locally or online.
What can the AI retouching do?
The new tool finds blemishes, moles and freckles on its own and retouches those spots. With the Remove and Restore brushes you correct the result, and in group photos you edit each face individually.
Task and new tool
Five new features in Lightroom Classic 16.0, as Adobe describes them
TaskNew in 16.0
- Retouch skinAI retouching for blemishes
- Separate foreground and backgroundAI depth maps
- Soften lightGlow effects
- Check skin tonesVectorscope
- Check focusAutofocus points
Description based on Adobe's announcement, without our own testing.
Source: Adobe Community
Adobe describes the new features in the community announcement only in bullet points. An overview from PhotoshopCAFE additionally mentions a slider called Natural Marks, which controls how many freckles and moles are left in place. For portraits with character, this slider decides whether a face looks natural or smoothed over.
What changes with masks, light and color?
The AI estimates a depth map for a photo, even if the file contains no depth information. With this map you select foreground, background and the area in between. Our assessment: the separation works best for portraits with distance to the background; for scenes with shallow layering, check the edge carefully.
Also new is Color Grading within a mask. You tint shadows, midtones and highlights separately, and only in the selected area. The Masks panel can also be rearranged: you reorder sections and place frequently used sliders in the favorites.
Three glow effects, Bloom, Halation and Diffusion, make images soft, dreamy or filmic, and five new styles are added. The Vectorscope in the Histogram panel shows hue, saturation, color casts and skin tones for the selected preview color space.
Which new features affect the workflow?
For Raw files from Canon, Nikon and Sony, the autofocus display shows the point on which the lens focused: right-click in Loupe view, then Show Autofocus Points. The points appear in the Library and Develop modules.
During import you now filter by file type, in-camera rating, color label or protection status, and the same filters apply in the selection aid called Assisted Culling. You delete history steps for several photos, folders or collections at once, on request on a schedule, to shrink the catalog. The Projection slider in the Upright modes stretches faces at the edge of wide-angle shots back into shape, and the Temperature slider for Raw files goes down to 1,500.
What this means for you
Back up the catalog before the update. Adobe does not require a catalog upgrade for 16.0, so the program runs immediately, and a copy protects you anyway. How to do this is shown in a lesson in the Lightroom Classic course.
Test the AI retouching first on a portrait series of your own and set the Natural Marks slider so that freckles remain. Only use client photos once it is clear where the calculation runs, because Adobe gives no information on this.
With the Vectorscope you compare the skin tones of several shots in a series before you deliver the series. For an introduction to the basics, the big tutorial on photo editing with Lightroom Classic is a good fit.
Adobe announced the version on November 10, 2026 in the Adobe Community.
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