Huge Lightroom Update For Landscape Photographers (What's New in Lightroom 8.3)

If you’re a Lightroom user who likes to stay on top of the latest features, the newly updated Lightroom Desktop v8.3 has several changes worth exploring—especially if you’re a landscape photographer or someone who shares albums with friends and family. This post breaks down the most impactful new tools, explains why they matter, and shows how they can simplify your editing and sharing workflow.

1. New Landscape Masking Tool

Lightroom’s masking tools just got a lot more powerful, and landscape photographers should get very excited about it! With version 8.3, a new Landscape masking tool has been introduced that mirrors the behavior of the People masking tool. When you open the masking panel in Lightroom Desktop and click on Landscape, Lightroom now automatically detects multiple attributes in your photo, including:

• Sky

• Mountains

• Architecture

• Vegetation

• Water

• Artificial Ground

• Natural Ground

You can choose which of these elements you want to create individual masks for, just like with people-based selections. Lightroom then creates separately labeled masks for each one, making it easy to fine-tune each area of your image.

Why it matters:

If you’ve ever manually masked a sky, then inverted it (to create a foreground mask), then subtracted trees or buildings, you’ll immediately appreciate the time this saves. And because each mask is already labeled (e.g., “Mountains,” “Sky”), you don’t need to rename anything to stay organized.

Example Workflow:

• Sky: Add Dehaze, boost saturation, drop shadow curve

• Mountains: Add clarity and texture, warm up temperature

• Architecture: Increase brightness, apply an S-curve, boost texture

• Water: Cool the temperature slightly, raise highlights, increase Dehaze

These kinds of localized edits used to take several manual steps, but now they can be done in a matter of seconds.

2. Shared Album Uploads

Lightroom’s shared album functionality now makes it even easier to let others contribute—a huge win for group events, photo shoots, or team projects.

How it works:

• Share an album with a public link

• In album settings, enable the new “Anyone Can Upload” option

• Share the link or QR code with collaborators

• They can upload photos directly to the album (requires a free Adobe ID login)

Contributors’ images are tagged with their user profile photos, making it easy to see who added what. And best of all, uploaded photos automatically appear in your Lightroom library.

Use cases:

• Collecting photos from events, concerts, parties, weddings, or group trips

• Sharing family albums where everyone contributes their own photos

3. Smart Object Workflow Fix (Finally)

One of the most frustrating bugs for anyone using Photoshop with Lightroom has finally been fixed: Smart Object transfers now preserve all Lightroom edits.

Previously, when you chose “Edit in Photoshop > Open as Smart Object in Photoshop,” the RAW edits you made in Lightroom would be lost when the image opened in Camera Raw because the image would be rasterized.

Now, all of your edits—including 32-bit HDR if enabled—are retained when opening as a Smart Object. That means full fidelity is preserved across apps, with no destructive rasterization.

This is especially helpful for:

• Making final tweaks in Photoshop

• Using Camera Raw features like AI Denoise and Generative Expand

• Working non-destructively with Smart Objects

4. Lightroom Can Now Display AI Edits from Adobe Camera Raw

Lightroom Desktop now renders AI-based edits made in Adobe Camera Raw, like:

• AI Denoise and Super Resolution (without creating a derivative DNG like in Lightroom)

• Generative Expand

After you apply these changes in Adobe Camera Raw and save the image, Lightroom will now recognize and display them properly.

5. Reflection Removal (in Adobe Camera Raw) Now Supports JPEGs and HEIC Files

While technically a feature of Adobe Camera Raw 17.3, this one’s worth including. Reflection Removal, previously limited to supported RAW and DNG files, now works with JPEG and HEIC files too.

To try it:

• Open a JPEG in Photoshop

• Apply the Camera Raw Filter

• Use the Remove > Reflections panel

• Adjust the quality settings and review the result

This makes it much easier to clean up window or glass reflections on mobile photos, scanned images, or any non-RAW files.

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