What's New

1.21.0 LatestOctober 2026§

• Much more of your Lightroom work comes across: migrated edits now bring over the tone curve (including the red, green and blue curves), HSL, black & white conversions and colour grading (split toning), not just basic tone, white balance and crop. Black & white and colour grading land in the Grading module, where the B&W mixer and colour wheels live.
• Spot removal that blends in: Lightroom's circle spots and brushed removals now come across in full and are healed properly, blending into their surroundings rather than leaving pale patches. A removal at the edge of a crop can now draw from outside the crop, just as it did in Lightroom.
• Crops that match Lightroom: migrated crops are now correct on portrait photos and on straightened (angled) photos, which previously could come out shifted or the wrong size.
• Repair Lightroom Previews: a new check finds migrated photos showing the camera's original image instead of your Lightroom look, or a grid thumbnail that doesn't match the full-size view, and fixes them (Library ▸ Analyse Photos ▸ Repair Lightroom Previews…). If any are found after you update, Lumidex Studio tells you and offers to run it. Future imports from Lightroom Classic now take every thumbnail size from the same Lightroom preview, so it shouldn't happen again.
• Lights Out: press L to dim everything but your photo, press again to black it out completely, and once more to bring the interface back. Works in Library, Develop, Grading, Print and Capture.
• Hide adjustment pins: in Develop, H now shows and hides the pins for masks, spot removal and red-eye so you can see the photo unobstructed. Showing the selected mask's overlay has moved to ⇧H.
• Fixes: messages that appear while background work finishes now always open over the app window, instead of on another desktop where they could leave the app unresponsive. A stray blue box no longer shows over the first-run explanations for Assisted Culling and the other library tools.

1.20.2September 2026§

• Highlights & Shadows that stay clean — pulling Highlights or Shadows no longer washes the image out. Recovering blown highlights now keeps whites bright instead of hazing them over, and deepening shadows holds onto detail instead of crushing everything into a muddy dark mass. Both work like Lightroom Classic's — they shape a tonal region while preserving its local contrast, and they leave skin tones and colour untouched.
• Fuller tone curves — the RGB point curve now takes as many points as you like, so intricate contrast shapes hold exactly as you draw them.
• Double-click to reset — double-clicking any Develop slider now snaps it back to its default, as it always should have.

1.20.1September 2026§

• Portable catalogue exports: when you export a selection as a standalone catalogue with its source files, the exported catalogue now finds its photos wherever it ends up, whether that's another Mac, a different user account, or a renamed folder. Previously the export remembered the original computer's exact file locations, so copying it elsewhere left every photo showing as missing even though the files sat right there in the export's Files folder. Existing exports repair themselves automatically the first time you open them in their new location.

1.20.0September 2026§

• A second display for your photos — Lumidex Studio can now fill a second monitor with the photo you're working on while the grid, filmstrip and panels stay on your main screen (Window ▸ Secondary Display). It follows your selection as you browse, mirrors your Develop edits live while you drag a slider, and can show two selected photos side by side for a compare. Lock it to one photo to keep it steady while you carry on, or switch it to Live to follow whatever your cursor is over in the grid — ideal for culling.
• Sharp 100% zoom in the Loupe — zooming a photo to actual size in the Loupe now shows true full-resolution detail instead of upscaling the preview, so pixel-level checks are genuinely sharp. Build the full-size previews ahead of time from Library ▸ Maintenance ▸ Previews ▸ Build 1:1 Previews for instant zoom (and Discard 1:1 Previews to reclaim the disk space later), or just zoom in and it renders on demand.
• Save and reuse your filters — set up a filter you use often (say four stars and up, picked, red label) and save it as a named preset from Library ▸ Filter by Preset. A new Filter by Metadata narrows the library by camera, lens, file type or year, picked from what's actually in your catalogue. And choosing any filter now takes effect straight away, with no separate Enable Filters step.
• Open Recent catalogues — File ▸ Open Recent lists the catalogues you've opened lately, so switching between libraries is a single click.

1.19.0August 2026§

• Your Lightroom edits, preserved — photos migrated from Lightroom Classic now open in Develop and Loupe looking exactly as they did in Lightroom — the finished edit, not the untouched original. Every kind of adjustment comes through: exposure and tone, colour and white balance, black-and-white conversions, crops and straightening, and object and spot removal. Bring them across from Library ▸ Analyse Photos ▸ Import Develop Settings from Lightroom…, or right-click a photo ▸ Develop Settings ▸ Import from Lightroom…, and point it at your .lrcat catalogue — it's read only, so Lightroom is never touched. Your library keeps the look you spent years building, and any new adjustments you make layer on top of it.
• Right-click anywhere — the full photo context menu is now available in Loupe view too, not just the grid and filmstrip, so rating, flagging, keywords, stacking and the rest are always one right-click away. The Library menu's batch tools are tidied into Maintenance, Find Duplicates and Analyse Photos submenus.

1.18.2August 2026§

• Recover blown highlights from RAW — a new RAW Latitude switch at the top of Develop's Basic panel. Turn it on for a RAW photo and pull the exposure back to bring detail back into blown skies and highlights that the standard preview had already thrown away. It's opt-in per photo, so your clean shots stay clean and crisp until you actually need the extra range.
• True RAW white balance — white balance now behaves like a real RAW temperature, anchored to your camera's as-shot Kelvin (shown as a live readout beneath the sliders) rather than a fixed nudge. Warm and cool shifts hold together properly, and the white-balance eyedropper and Auto White Balance both neutralise accurately on RAW files.
• Find your clipped highlights — a new scan flags every photo with blown highlights: a badge on the grid, a Clipped filter in the toolbar, and a prompt in Develop. Recover a photo and its flag clears automatically, so the filter doubles as a to-do list of shots still to fix. Run it from Library ▸ Analyse Photos ▸ Scan for Clipped Highlights; new imports are checked automatically.

1.18.1August 2026§

• Import from cloud storage — the Import window now lists your cloud drives — iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive — as sources you can browse and import from directly. Photos that live only in the cloud, including iCloud "Optimise Mac Storage" placeholders, are shown and downloaded on demand as they're imported, so nothing is missed just because it isn't on your Mac yet.
• Fuller local adjustments — the Graduated, Radial, Brush and AI Select masks now include Texture, Dehaze and Vibrance alongside the existing controls, arranged to mirror the Basic panel. Shape a single area — a sky, a face, a background — with the core toolset in full. The mask panel fits its sliders without scrolling.
• Scrub through your edit history — the History panel gains a movable slider: drag back to any earlier point in a photo's history to see how it looked at that stage. Carry on editing from there and a fresh line of history continues from that point, discarding the states you rolled past — the same way Lightroom Classic's history works.

1.18.0August 2026§

• White balance, fixed properly — Temp and Tint now move the way every other editor does: drag Temp right to warm the image, and +Tint adds magenta. Tint is far less sensitive, so small corrections stay small. The white-balance eyedropper now sets an absolute balance — clicking a neutral tone always lands the same result and no longer stacks on top of Auto White Balance.
• Sharp and clean at 100% on RAW — zooming in to inspect a RAW file now stays clean instead of revealing raw sensor grain; the full-resolution view uses the camera's own image, so pixel-peeping looks right.
• Live histogram — the Develop histogram now updates continuously while you drag a slider, instead of only when you let go, so setting a precise black or white point is much easier. It also reads more clearly, with a log scale that keeps the whole distribution visible and cleanly blended colour channels.
• Tone curve handles — the black-point and white-point handles are now always visible and draggable on the Develop tone curve.
• Grading module polish — the colour plot now matches a broadcast vectorscope (skin tones sit around 11 o'clock), and the panel is sized to match the rest of the app.

1.17.1August 2026§

• Full-resolution zoom in Develop — zoom past 100% and Develop now shows true full-resolution detail decoded straight from the RAW or DNG for the part of the frame you're viewing, instead of upscaling the fast preview. Pixel-level inspection is genuinely sharp — a noticeable difference for DNG libraries — while everyday editing stays fast.
• Navigator zoom works in Develop — the Navigator's zoom presets and percentage readout now drive the Develop canvas (they previously only controlled the Library loupe), and the readout tracks pinch-zoom.

1.17.0August 2026§

• Colour Grading module — a dedicated grading workspace (⌥G): balance shadows, midtones and highlights on colour wheels, drag pins on a hue/chroma plot to retarget specific colours, match the look of a reference image, or mix a black-and-white conversion. A tonecaliper-style toolset that reaches well past Lightroom Classic's Color Grading panel.
• Photo Merge — Focus Stacking & HDR — combine a focus-bracketed set into a single fully-sharp frame, or blend an exposure bracket into one natural-looking HDR, entirely on-device. The merged photo is catalogued and stacked with its originals.
• Much stronger AI Denoise — the on-device denoiser now genuinely cleans high-ISO noise all the way through to full export resolution, with an Amount slider so you can dial in exactly how much smoothing you want and keep skin and fine detail looking natural.
• AI keywords in the sidebar — the descriptive tags the on-device auto-tagger finds now appear as a dimmed, searchable section beneath your own keywords (View ▸ Show AI Keywords), with a tighter, more reliable tagging pass.

1.10.7August 2026§

• First-launch fix — fixed the Welcome screen occasionally opening stranded on its own full-screen Space on a fresh install.

1.10.6August 2026§

• Wider Mac support — the minimum macOS is now 15.6 (Sequoia), so Lumidex Studio runs on more Macs.

1.10.5August 2026§

• Better tone controls — Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks now ride a single neutral tone curve, clearing up a colour cast and an uneven push/pull response in the old sliders.
• Crop refinements — the crop handles no longer clip at the edge of the frame, and your crop is preserved when you straighten a photo.
• Email Photo (⇧⌘M) — render a selection and attach it straight to a new mail message, ready to review and send.
• Export as Catalogue — wired up in the File menu, alongside a quick V shortcut to preview an image in black and white.
• Live import volumes — the Import window now shows drives appearing and disappearing as you plug them in or eject them. Also fixed a bug where the Preferences tabs wouldn't switch.

1.10.0August 2026§

• HEIC export — export finished photos as HEIC in 8- or 10-bit, using Apple's native encoder, so the photos you share stop devouring storage the way high-quality JPEG does. It reuses the whole export pipeline — quality, colour space, resize, rename and metadata all carry across.
• Export straight to Apple Photos — a new Export To choice at the top of the Export dialog sends your exports directly into the Photos app, leaving no stray files on disk, with an option to open Photos when it finishes.

1.9.0August 2026§

• RAW + JPEG pairs — shoot RAW+JPEG and Lumidex keeps the two files together as a single photo, with a per-picture switch (⇧⌘J, or right-click) to choose which one you browse, edit and export from. Rate, flag, colour, keyword or add a pair to a collection once and it applies to both. Nothing in Lightroom or Lightroom Classic offers a per-picture RAW/JPEG switch — an Aperture-style workflow especially loved by Fujifilm film-recipe shooters. Pair up shots already in your library with Library ▸ Find RAW + JPEG Pairs.

1.8.1July 2026§

• Scope refinements — a rotatable sampler region, a matte that blacks out everything but the sampled area, a smoother vectorscope, and tear-off drag to pop the scopes into a floating window.
• Import — Locked / Protected filter — scope the import browser to only the in-camera protected files (or only the unprotected ones), with lock badges.
• Jump to folder after import — an optional preference to jump straight to the destination folder when an import finishes.

1.8.0July 2026§

• Pop-out scopes — tear the Histogram / Vectorscope / Parade off into a resizable floating window, ideal on a second monitor.
• Sampler region — restrict the scopes to a movable, resizable region of the image for skin-tone and white-balance checks.
• Filmic grain — luminance-responsive grain applied over the whole edit, strongest in the midtones rather than a flat overlay.
• Per-panel Develop switches — toggle Basic / Tone Curve / HSL / Detail / Lens / Effects on and off for one-click A/B.

1.6.0July 2026§

• Develop scopes — the histogram area now switches between three scopes: the Histogram, a Vectorscope (colour balance and skin-tone reference line) and an RGB Parade (per-channel exposure and white balance). A genuine Lightroom Classic gap — Adobe's plug-ins can't reach pixel data, so no third party could add a real vectorscope. See Scopes.
• In-app Help — the Help menu now opens hosted documentation for every module, plus this release-notes page.

1.5.0July 2026§

• Focus-point overlay in the Loupe — see exactly which AF point the camera used, over the image (View ▸ Show Focus Points).
• Assisted culling — surfaces the sharpest frame in a burst and flags soft shots.
• Library maintenance tools — Find All Missing Photos, Validate DNG Files, and Build Standard Previews, each with a background progress bar.

1.4.0July 2026§

• Lens Blur — on-device AI depth-of-field: an estimated depth map drives a synthetic background blur with tap-to-focus. See AI tools.

1.3.0July 2026§

• Super Resolution — on-device AI upscaling at 2× and 4× (or a custom long-edge size), producing a new stacked photo. See AI tools.
• AI Select masking — click a subject and an on-device model (SAM 2.1) selects it for a local adjustment, snapping to the real edges — no manual brushing.

1.2.0July 2026§

• AI Denoise — on-device noise reduction in the Develop AI panel, copyable and pasteable across a selection as a batch.

1.1.0July 2026§

• Natural-language search — describe what you remember ("yellow guitar", "red door") and find matching photos across the whole catalogue, entirely on-device.

1.0.0July 2026§

• First release. Import from Lightroom Classic, a familiar Library, non-destructive Develop, tethered Capture, Export and Print — a direct-download app you buy once and own forever.