Powerful and intuitive photo workflow software with easy cloud syncing
Adobe Lightroom has long been a favorite among professional photographers. The photo editing software now comes in two flavors: the newer Lightroom (the focus of this review) and Lightroom Classic. Lightroom (non-Classic) suits serious amateur photographers who want class-leading editing and organizing tools in a modern interface, along with seamless cloud syncing. If you are among that group, Lightroom is an Editors’ Choice winner. That said, Lightroom Classic remains our Editors’ Choice winner for pros, thanks to its local printing, plug-in, and tethering support.Lightroom vs. Lightroom Classic
Lightroom is primarily photo workflow software. That means you use it to import, adjust, edit, and share images. Lightroom includes some Photoshop-like tools that save you from opening that app, such as AI object removal and masking auto-selection for backgrounds, people, and things. It provides tons of helpful tutorials and community features.
Though its capabilities continue to expand, this version of Lightroom is still missing some functionality of the Classic product. It still doesn’t offer color label organization, local printing, plug-in support, robust file conversion, or tethered shooting.
Conversely, Lightroom has some features that Classic doesn’t. Most of these tools are of interest to non-pros. A standout among them is access to a photo-sharing community in which people can upload their (PG-rated) images for others to see and even « remix » with edits. How Much Does Lightroom Cost?
You have at least three options for buying Lightroom. The Lightroom plan costs $9.99 per month (with an annual commitment) and includes 1TB of online storage. You don’t get Photoshop with this plan. The Photography plan, also $9.99 per month, gets you Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop but includes just 20GB of cloud storage. Getting the full, three-app package with 1TB of online storage costs $19.99 per month. There’s no single-month subscription option for any of the plans, and you don’t get a discount for paying the full year up front. All the Lightroom plans include Adobe Portfolio, a web showcase for your photography.
Another option is to get all three programs and many more with a $59.99-per-month Creative Cloud subscription. This subscription comes with 100GB of cloud storage, which you can upgrade to 1TB for an additional $9.99 per month.
At about $120 per year, Lightroom is more expensive in the long run than competing photo software such as ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate ($149.99), Capture One ($299), CyberLink PhotoDirector Ultra ($99), DxO PhotoLab ($229), Corel PaintShop Pro ($79), and Skylum Luminar ($299) Keep in mind that those are one-time prices that often see discounts: Pay once, and you own the software forever. You can, of course, pay for major upgrades if you want them.
As for other subscription options, CyberLink PhotoDirector 365 and Zoner Photo Studio cost just $59.99 and $59 per year. The latter still provides basic functionality once you stop paying.
Lightroom’s cloud storage is pricey compared with other services. A terabyte of OneDrive storage costs about half as much as a Lightroom subscription at $69.99 per year; it includes photo syncing capabilities and access to all the Microsoft 365 productivity apps. For the same $9.99 per month as Lightroom, Google One provides 2TB (the first 15GB is free). For the money, you get reasonably powerful editing, organizing, and sharing tools via Google Photos.What’s New in Lightroom?
Here’s a list of the latest updates for Adobe Lightroom:
Accessibility Improvements. You can now use Lightroom with a screen reader or just the keyboard.
Auto Advance for Culling. This new option lets you auto-advance after you rate an image or choose Pick or Reject.
Edit With External Applications. This works with any photo application or utility and in a round-trip fashion, so your image comes back into Lightroom after the external edits.
Content Credentials (Early Access). Verify image provenance and edit history via a digital signature in your exported photos.
Generative Remove Improvements. The tool that fills areas of your photo with generated content that matches the background is now smarter at detecting what you want to remove and what you want to keep, even with complex backgrounds.
provements. Lightroom now supports exporting with HDR gain maps, thus allowing an image to appear correctly in HDR or SDR, depending on the display hardware. Otherwise, the Merge dialog box can now display photos in HDR, and the macOS version supports HDR video.
More Preset Options. You can now apply presets to multiple photos at once, favorite them, and see thumbnail previews.
Quick Actions for Mobile and Web (Early Access). This early access tool offers one-click Auto Light and Color, Background Blur, Black and White (B&W), Pop, and Warm adaptive presets on the mobile and web versions of Lightroom. You can still use a slider to adjust each effect’s strength.
Search-Based Smart Albums. Create an album based on a search that populates as you add matching photos.
A couple of other recent, important updates include support for keeping photos in local storage—the application used to force you to upload everything to Adobe’s cloud servers. Although that’s convenient for maintaining a collection everywhere, it isn’t something everyone wants. Another big one is that Lightroom finally got automatic noise reduction, a capability that’s been in competing software like DxO PhotoLab for a decade.Getting Started With Lightroom
Installing Lightroom is a simple matter of tapping Install in the Creative Cloud utility. If you’re starting from zero, you have to install that utility first. Another way to get Lightroom is from the Microsoft Store on Windows or the Mac App Store on macOS. With either installation option, an auto-update setting saves you from worrying about whether you’re running the latest version.
The software runs on macOS 12 (Monterey) or later and Windows 10 22H2 or later, including Windows 11. It supports both Apple silicon and Windows on Arm hardware. The Lightroom app takes up 1.5GB, half a gigabyte less than Lightroom Classic.A Refreshing Interface
Lightroom uses a stylish and very understandable interface. It uses progressive disclosure, meaning it starts out simple and then reveals increasingly complex tools as you need them. The interface has four buttons along the left rail: a plus sign for adding photos, Learn, Community (formerly called Discover), All Photos, and Albums. The Learn screen shows tutorials, complete with sample photo thumbnails. You spend most of your time in All Photos, where you select and edit images. The All Photos view has useful Recently Added and Recent Edits filters, as well as By Date and People (using face recognition) sorting options. The Connections option under All Photos is where you manage online sharing connections.
With this radical rethinking of Lightroom, Adobe ditches the modes of its predecessor—Library, Develop, and the rest. Aside from the rows of your synced photos, the interface is notably sparse. To show the organization and adjustment tools, use the control slider icons at the left and right edges, respectively. The organization panel and adjustment panel don’t show at the same time, by default; when you open one, the other closes. You can change this behavior in Preferences by switching the panels from Automatic to Manual.
In All Photos or one of its subcategories, double-clicking on a thumbnail in the tile view opens a photo in full view, and double-clicking again takes you back to the gallery view, just as in Lightroom Classic. Tapping the full photo view (the cursor appears as a plus sign) enlarges the image to 100%. Afterward, the cursor changes to a hand, letting you drag the image around. At the bottom right, you get Fit, Fill, and 1:1 choices. There’s a Show Original button, and now you also get a side-by-side compare view. However, you can’t compare the edited version with the original, just two different photos. If you want to do that, you have to duplicate an image and then set up the side-by-side view.
The program doesn’t make especially good use of the mouse wheel. Zooming in and out using the Ctrl-mouse wheel is more awkward than in CyberLink PhotoDirector and ON1 PhotoRAW. Some keyboard shortcuts, like Z and X for pick and reject, F for full-screen, and E for Edit, still work, but many from Classic don’t. If you’re used to Lightroom Classic, you have some relearning to do. The good news is that Lightroom non-Classic uses the more intuitive C for crop and Ctrl-E for export with previous settings. (Lightroom Classic uses R and Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E, respectively.)
As for touch input, Lightroom is adequate. You can easily use its buttons and controls via touch, and you can tap or unpinch a photo to zoom it to the last level. Both Lightroom Classic and Photoshop have a full-touch mode for tablets and touch-screen PCs, such as the Surface Pro.
You can create edit versions so you can compare two or more edit processes. Simply tap the Versions option at the bottom right of the adjustments panel, and a Versions panel pops out that shows all of the versions. One thing to note is that you can’t edit a version once you create it. You can, however, continue editing with your edits in place for another version, and you can always use Ctrl-C to copy edit settings from a version.Extra Help and Tutorials
Lightroom includes a boatload of help and tutorial content. Click the question mark at the top right to get started. You get animated visual help on all the adjustments, along with wizards that use sample images from notable photographers to show exactly how they edit an image. It even shows their adjustment slider settings. The help is context-sensitive. For example, for an outdoor portrait, it aptly proposes the tutorial called Enhance Natural Light Portraits by Improving Contrast and Color. I welcome this guidance right in the app. By contrast, all of Lightroom Classic’s help is web-based.
If you aren’t familiar with image correction and enhancement, the program’s animated sample editing steps can be very helpful in getting started on a photo editing journey. The edit guides show the effect of each adjustment in sequence. Then again, nothing is stopping you from simply messing with the sliders to get a look that suits your taste. Still, not everyone needs to reinvent every wheel.Importing Images in Lightroom
Neither Lightroom nor Classic pops up as an Auto-Play option when you insert an SD memory card. I prefer big, always-available Import buttons like in Classic, but you have to press + Add Photos with Lightroom and then choose the source folder or card. When you import pictures from a camera card, you see a grid of all the card’s images.
During an import, Lightroom uploads all of the images to Adobe’s servers by default. However, you can always change this behavior. Automatic uploads are convenient if you prefer a hands-off approach, but I prefer to have more controls. You can pause uploading but can’t specify folders and files that you don’t want to upload.Working on Local Drives
Adobe finally listened to complaints and now lets you work with photos entirely offline, just like in Lightroom Classic. This is a huge, game-changing update since it saves you from having to wait for everything to upload and pay for more online storage if your collection outgrows your allotment. Just keep in mind that you can’t use the AI-powered image search for such images.
You can mark local folders as Favorites for easy access and add metadata to the images, including captions, copyrights, location (including GPS coordinates), and titles. For location, you can get GPS coordinates from an online map. Adding this data creates a mini-map for your photo, similar to what you get with photos from your phone.
The import process has long been one of the pain points of Lightroom. At import, you can choose to add images to a specific album, but that’s it. To choose a standard raw import option, such as Adobe Color, or an effect-like default, such as the Vintage Instant Creative, you must go to the settings. You can use a custom preset you created as a default at import, as well. But most good photo apps let you decide on any preset applications in the import dialog. I miss the ability to apply Auto Settings at import, which often serves as a good starting point in adjusting a photo’s lighting, color, and detail. Since the program now uses AI for this, it might not be practical to apply at import, however.
What frustrates me most about Lightroom’s import process is that, unlike in Classic, you can’t view the images at a large size individually. This makes it harder to cull images before import. This isn’t an issue with several other photo applications, such as ACDSee Pro and DxO PhotoLab, which let you view any images on your disk at full-size without importing.
