Photoshop Adds Lightroom-Style Lighting Controls Alongside New AI Tools

Photoshop has increasingly centered its latest updates around AI capabilities, and the newest release continues that trend with several additions. However, Adobe is also finally bringing Photoshop users something they have requested for years: lighting controls similar to those available in Lightroom. The addition should make straightforward edits faster by enabling creators to perform RAW-quality adjustments without having to leave Photoshop.

The new Light Adjustment Layer offers “professional-grade lighting controls” through a non-destructive layer. Its settings cover exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks, providing “camera raw-level results without ever leaving your Photoshop layers workflow,” according to Adobe. As someone who regularly uses both Photoshop and Lightroom, I would say the company is long overdue in adding this capability.

Meanwhile, the latest AI additions focus primarily on generating images. The first is “Instruct Edit with Masks,” which is powered by Firefly Image 5. After masking the portion of an image that needs work, users can describe the exact changes they want “such as opening closed eyes or placing a hat on a specific person’s head” through straightforward prompts, Adobe says. Areas outside the mask remain unchanged, helping preserve important parts of the image.

Another addition, Markup, appears particularly useful. Used alongside text prompts, it allows users to communicate their desired result to the AI by drawing directly over the image. “Select areas to recolor, sketch arrows to indicate position or brush in rough shapes to suggest new elements,” Adobe explains. In one demonstration, a roughly sketched cat and wall tiles are shown, with the AI subsequently filling them with photorealistic LLM-created elements.

Adobe is also rolling out the AI Assisted Editor in beta, bringing several Photoshop AI capabilities together in a dedicated interface featuring a natural-language prompt bar. The collection includes Prompt to Edit, which enables image transformations through natural-language instructions, as well as Remove Background, Generative Expand, the Remove Tool, Generative Fill, Generative Upscale and AI Markup. Users can still access these tools through Photoshop’s standard professional interface.

Additional Photoshop Features Expand Text, Shape and Stock Capabilities

Other additions include Dynamic Text, Shapes and Paths, which expands Photoshop’s Dynamic Text functionality to work with any custom shape or path. Adobe has also created a Stock Panel Integration that brings more than 900 million Adobe Stock assets directly into Photoshop through a dockable panel. All of these features are now included in the latest Photoshop update, available through Creative Cloud.