Lightroom can now edit video, too

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Lightroom, Adobe’s photo editing app, is getting a surprising new feature: the ability to edit video.

With an update rolling out this week, Lightroom users will be able to work with the app’s existing controls to color grade their videos. Lightroom’s controls are, in my experience at least, a lot more intuitive for adjusting how an image looks than traditional color grading tools in video apps; combined with users’ familiarity with the controls, the new feature should be a powerful option for anyone who wants to change up how a video looks.

Image: Adobe
Color grading video in Lightroom.

That all said, Lightroom is not transforming into a video app (and, in fact, it could already import videos, just not edit them). The new tools allow you to color grade footage and trim down the beginning and end of clips. But you can’t arrange clips into a timeline, so if you want to color grade a film scene in here, you’d have to move from shot to shot, copying adjustments along the way. Instead, this seems to be meant more for photographers who happen to capture a few short clips as they’re out on a shoot.

The video editing feature will come to Lightroom on both desktop and mobile. It won’t come to Lightroom Classic, which already supports video editing to a much more limited degree. (You could trim videos and apply basic tone controls from the Library screen, but the full develop panel wasn’t available like it will be in the newer Lightroom.)

Both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are getting a handful of other updates, including an intensity slider to dial effects up or down and new “adaptive presets” filters, which use AI to apply effects to specific parts of an image, like the subject or sky.