Adobe Lightroom adds support for RAW photos from Pixel 4a, 5a, and 6a

Damien Wilde | Apr 18 2023 - 7:03 am PT

While we are advocates for taking simple point-and-shoot photos with the Pixel series, RAW photos from any Android device allow you to make tweaks long after the shutter has been pressed. For Pixel A-series owners, we have good news as Adobe is making it even easier for owners to edit pictures taken in apps like Lightroom with the Pixel 4a, 5a, and 6a series.

Adobe has an extensive list of camera models that are officially supported by the Adobe Camera Raw extension. When importing images into Creative Cloud applications such as Lightroom, Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, After Effect, and several others, Camera Raw processes the RAW photos. As part of the April 2023 update, the list has been expanded to include the Pixel 4a, Pixel 5a, and Pixel 6a.

The Pixel A-series often gets overlooked when services like Lightroom, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and others are concerned. It’s nice to see that Adobe has not forgotten about the mid-rangers, especially given that the Pixel 4a will technically be unsupported by Google later this year.

Sadly, while the added support is nice if you use Lightroom on your PC, Mac, or even your mobile, the camera matching profile is not available for Pixel 4a, 5a, or 6a. That said, all lenses of the trio are supported including the ultrawide on the Pixel 5a and 6a. Another blow is the “Lens Correction” profiles are not available for the wider FOV lenses. The unreleased Panasonic Lumix S5 II X and recently released Sony ZV-E1 do gain support with the April update.

You’ll need both Adobe Camera Raw version 15.3 as well as Lightroom 6.3 and/or Lightroom Classic 12.3 to get support for the Pixel A-series cameras.

After this update, there are two glaring omissions from the Adobe Camera Raw supported list. However, if you’re wondering where the Pixel 3a, 3a XL, and 4a 5G are on this extensive table, the devices have identical systems to the Pixel 3a series and Pixel 5 respectively. This also means that all Pixel series handsets are officially supported by Adobe.