Lightroom 9.5 has landed, and alongside the usual list of bug fixes, new camera and lens profiles and a few Windows performance tweaks, there are three additions that actually change how you work day to day.
One thing to get out of the way first. This update is for Lightroom Desktop. Classic had its own round of updates at the same time, but a couple of these features haven't made their way over to Classic yet, so if you're a Classic user, don't go looking for all of them.
Feather and Edge, for masks that don't bleed
The masking panel now has two new sliders, Feather and Edge.
If you use Camera Raw, or you've been running the pre-release builds, these will look familiar. They're just available to everyone now.
Worth being clear about what they do and what they don't. They don't make Lightroom any better at finding your subject. If Select Subject misses completely, these two sliders aren't going to rescue it. What they do is let you clean up the last few pixels along the edge of a selection, which is usually where the trouble is.
Turn on the mask overlay so you can actually see the boundary, then work the two sliders until the mask pulls tight against the edge. That's it. No more adjustments spilling over onto things you didn't want to touch.
On portraits it's the eyes, the lips and the skin masks, where a brightening adjustment has a habit of creeping onto the eyelid or the surrounding skin. On landscapes and architecture it's horizons, tree branches against a bright sky, and the edges of buildings, all the places a halo turns up if you're not careful.
Render to DNG, and why it's the interesting one
Right click any photo now and there's a new option in the menu: Render to DNG.
What it does is create a brand new file with all your current edits baked into the pixels, and it sits right alongside your original in the catalogue.
If you're a Photoshop person, think of it as a stamp visible layer. You get a flattened version to work on top of, and your original raw file is still sitting underneath it completely untouched, with every setting still live.
It says DNG, but it isn't raw
This is the bit worth slowing down for. Despite the .dng on the end, a rendered DNG is not a raw file. It's closer to a TIFF in a DNG wrapper.
Your original raw is the negative. It's holding all the hidden highlight and shadow data you can't see on screen but can pull back when you need to. The rendered DNG is the print. It has baked in whatever the picture looked like at the moment you rendered it, and anything you hadn't already recovered has gone.
So the rule is simple enough. Do your recovery on the raw. Pulling back a blown sky, lifting shadows that have gone dead, any serious white balance shift, all of that happens on the original file before you render anything. Once you've rendered, that detail isn't coming back.
What the rendered file is good for is adjusting rather than recovering. Contrast, fine tuning tone, stacking a heavy look on top. Things that work with what's already there rather than digging for what isn't.
Stacking presets without losing your edit
Here's where it earns its keep.
You know the problem. You spend twenty minutes dialling in exposure, tone curve and split toning, you get it exactly where you want it, and then you try a full look preset and it wipes the lot. Every slider you'd carefully set gets overwritten.
The way round it now is to finish your base edit on the raw file, right click and Render to DNG, then apply the preset to the new rendered file instead.
Because your edits are baked into the pixels of that rendered file, there are no sliders left for the preset to overwrite. It sits on top of your work rather than replacing it.
Just keep half an eye on the highlights when you're stacking, because a rendered file has less headroom than the raw did, and it'll clip sooner than you expect.
Crop and Expand
The Crop panel has been renamed Crop and Expand, and you can now drag the crop boundary outwards past the edge of the original frame. Handy for anything you framed a bit too tight.
When you expand, you get two ways to fill the new space.
Generative Expand uses AI to invent new content, which is what you want for a complicated background. It costs one credit on standard accounts, and it's free if you're on CC Pro.
Content-Aware Expand samples pixels from elsewhere in your own photo. It costs nothing on any plan, because it isn't generative, and for plain or repeating backgrounds it does the job perfectly well. Try that one first and save your credits for when you genuinely need them.
There's a catch with Generative Expand, though, and it's worth knowing about. When you run it, Lightroom flattens your existing AI edits, so any AI masking or Generative Remove you'd done gets locked in and you lose the ability to go back and tweak it.
Same fix as before. Do your AI edits and base adjustments on the raw, render to DNG, then drag the crop out and run the expand on the rendered file. Your master raw stays fully intact with the masks still live, and you've got a separate expanded version to export.
Everything else in 9.5
Beyond those three, there's a decent list of fixes and new support:
masking sliders that wouldn't reset properly
launch crashes caused by permission errors
star rating glitches
GPS data not pasting in local view
smoother grid scrolling and faster window resizing on Windows
new camera support for the GoPro Mission 1, GoPro Mission Pro and preliminary support for the Sony RX10 V
new lens profiles including the Canon RF 7-14mm Fisheye, DJI Mavic 4 Pro, Sigma 85mm f/1.2 and a handful of macro lenses
So, next time you're editing
If a subject mask is bleeding onto something it shouldn't, reach for Feather and Edge.
If you want to try a preset over an edit you've already spent time on, render to DNG first.
And if you need a bit more room around a tight portrait, render to DNG, open Crop and Expand, and try Content-Aware before you spend a credit.
Render to DNG is the one I'd point at if you only look at one thing here. It's a small menu item that's easy to scroll past, and it quietly solves a problem plenty of us have been working around for years.