Adobe's Lightroom photo software has long been a favorite among professional photographers.
They now have a choice of flavors: Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.
The first (the subject of this review) is primarily designed for serious amateur photographers who want to access their photos online and use some powerful editing and organizing tools.
Lightroom Classic retains the program's traditional interface and toolset for working professional photographers.
Adobe has been gradually adding features to bring the newer sibling up towards parity with Classic.
In the June 2020 update, Adobe has included watermarking, local hue adjustments, versions, and custom raw import settings to Lightroom.
Unfortunately, the new program still lacks local printing, tethering, and plug-in support—among other things.
Many veteran users will likely still want to stick with Lightroom Classic, a Daxdi Editors' Choice.
Other features that arrived after the program's initial release include the ability to export to the DNG raw file format, drag-and-drop support for Albums, keywords for shared albums, and keyword auto-completion.
Both Lightrooms now have a Texture slider and an AI-powered Enhance Details tool.
The nifty Profiles feature offers treatment options for converting raw camera files into viewable images; those determine the starting point of your editing journey.
Some creative Profiles that are similar to Instagram filters join the Raw Profiles, and those can be used on JPGs as well as raw images.
Lightroom now has panorama and HDR-merging capabilities.
At this point, the simpler Lightroom offers nearly all the actual image-editing tools found in Lightroom Classic, save Post-Crop Vignetting, Profile calibration, and Flat-Field correction—all quite advanced options.
More notable missing-in-action features concern organization, workflow, and output.
Pricing and Setup
You have at least three options when buying the newer Lightroom.
The Lightroom plan runs $9.99 per month and includes 1TB of online storage, but with that plan you don't get Photoshop.
The Photography plan, also $9.99 per month, gets you Lightroom, Photoshop, and Lightroom Classic, but it only includes 20GB of cloud storage.
Getting the full package with 1TB online storage costs an additional $10 per month.
Of course, you get all three programs (and many more) with a full, $52.99-per-month Creative Cloud subscription, though that only comes with 100GB of cloud storage (upgradeable to 1TB for an additional $9.99 per month).
All of the plans include Adobe Portfolio, which lets you create a web showcase for your photography.
At about $120 per year, Lightroom is more expensive in the long run than competing photo software such as ACDSee Ultimate ($99), Capture One ($299), CyberLink PhotoDirector ($50), DxO PhotoLab ($129-$199), PaintShop Pro ($79), and Skylum Luminar ($69).
Keep in mind, too, that those are one-shot prices: Pay once and you own the software forever, unless a major upgrade you want comes along.
Even in the short run, it's double the price of Zoner Photo Studio, which has a $4.99-per-month subscription (or $49 per year) with 20GB cloud storage, and that program keeps working if you stop paying—you just won't get future updates.
In terms of cloud storage, Lightroom is also pricey compared with other services.
A terabyte of OneDrive storage costs about half a Lightroom subscription, at $69.99 per year, and that includes photo syncing, along with all the Office apps.
For the same $9.99 per month as Lightroom, Apple's iCloud gives you 2TB—twice as much as Adobe.
Google Drive also charges $9.99 for 2TB, but if you don't mind saving compressed versions of your photos, you can upload everything for free.
If you just want photo software without the cloud storage and syncing, you can get Adobe Photoshop Elements for $99, or Corel PaintShop Pro for $79.99—both as one-time purchases.
Creative Cloud subscribers with the eponymous utility installed now see two Lightroom choices: Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.
Installing is a simple matter of tapping Install in the Creative Cloud utility.
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-app-update setting saves you from worrying about whether you're running the latest version.
The Lightroom app takes up 1.3GB on my hard drive, half a gigabyte less than Lightroom Classic.
The Lightroom Interface
Lightroom sports a refreshing, clean interface.
It features what Adobe product director Tom Hogarty calls "progressive disclosure," meaning it starts out simple and then reveals increasingly complex tools as you need them.
The interface now has four buttons along the left rail: A plus sign for adding photos, Home, My Photos, and Sharing.
The Home screen shows new tutorials along with a row of your photos thumbnails.
You'll spend most time in My Photos, where you select and edit images.
You can switch that to a contact-sheet view and sort by import date, capture date, or modified date.
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.
Organization and adjustment tools are hidden behind box and 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.
Thankfully, you can change this behavior in Preferences by switching the panels from Automatic to Manual.
In My Photos, Double-clicking on a thumbnail in the tile view opens a photo in full view, and double-tapping 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 percent.
After this, the cursor changes to a hand, letting you drag the image around.
At the bottom right, there are also Fit, Fill, and 1:1 choices.
There's a Show Original button, but no side-by-side before-and-after view such as you get in Lightroom Classic.
You can use the mouse wheel while holding down Ctrl to zoom in and out, but this only stops at major points like fit, fill, and 1:1; you don't get a zoom slider showing you the percent, as you do in CyberLink PhotoDirector.
New for the June 2020 update is the ability to create edit versions, so you can compare two or more edit processes.
You simply tap the Versions option at the bottom-right of the adjustments panel, and a Versions panel pops out to the left of the adjustments, giving easy access to your multiple versions.
One thing to note is that you can't edit a version; once you create it, its adjustments are fixed, though you can continue editing with your edits in place for another version, and you can, as always, use Ctrl-C to copy edit settings from the version.
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.
Lightroom Classic (as well as Photoshop) features a full touch mode for tablets and touch-screen PCs such as the Surface Book.
Lightroom includes a boatload of help and tutorial content.
Click the question mark at top right to get started.
There's animated visual help on all the individual adjustments, along with wizards that use sample images from noted photographers to show exactly how they edit an image; it even shows their adjustment slider settings.
The help is context-sensitive: For an outdoor portrait, it aptly proposes the tutorial called Enhance Natural Light Portraits by Improving Contrast and Color.
I welcome having this kind of thing built right into the app.
By contrast, all of Lightroom Classic's help is web-based.
New for the June 2020 update are community-contributed tutorials.
In fact, it appears that Adobe is trying to create a whole photo-editing social network, similar to what CyberLink has had for video editors for many years with its DirectorZone.
The Home button takes you to a page showing tutorials and guided edits created by both seasoned pros and by Joe users.
Fortunately, users have to submit the edit process and Adobe only includes those they approve.
You can hover the mouse cursor over a photo in the Community Edits page to see its original, and some are indeed impressive.
If you like a community edit's contributor, you can follow them, à la social networks.
For users who aren't old hands at image correction and enhancement, these animated sample editing steps can be of great assistance in getting them started on a photo editing journey.
The edit guides show the effect of each adjustment in sequence.
Of course, 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
Neither Lightroom nor Classic pops up as an Auto-Play option when you insert an SD memory card.
I like to have a big Import button always handy, but with the new Lightroom, you have to press the + button 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; unlike previous versions of Lightroom, this iteration doesn't let you view a photo at full size before importing it.
When you import, all the images are automatically backed up to Adobe's servers.
Hands-off people will probably appreciate this, but I'd prefer more control over what's uploaded.
You can pause uploading, but you can't specify folders and files you don't want uploaded.
For the ability to exclude images from uploading to the cloud, look to Lightroom Classic.
Also look there (or even to the Windows Photos app) for automatic importing from folders you specify.
The import process has long been one of the pain points of Lightroom: Many have complained on photo forums and blogs about how slow it is.
I personally also hate wasting upload time and storage space with images I may not want to save.
Professionals with loads of RAID storage probably want everything imported, but they also want it to happen fast.
To be fair, importing is now faster in Lightroom (and also in the recently updated Classic).
You still can't apply presets or metadata at import, though you can choose to add imported images to a specified album.
New for the June 2020 update is the ability to choose a default raw import setting, however.
This lets you not only choose a standard raw import option such as Adobe Color, but you can also choose a more effect-like default such as the Vintage Instant Creative preset.
You can use a custom preset you created yourself as a default at import, as well.
I tested import performance with 190 raw files from a Canon 80D to my Windows 10 PC with 16GB DDR4 RAM, a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-6700 CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 745 discrete graphics card.
Lightroom took 5:04 for the import, which was on the high end for the field.
For comparison, Skylum Luminar took 5:03.
Lightroom Classic took 3:51, Capture One took 4:55, and Zoner Photo Studio took 4:54.
Note that the Lightroom (non-Classic) import time doesn't include completing uploading the images to the cloud, just importing into the local application.
Raw Profiles
If you really want to get the most editing potential out of your digital camera, you'll import raw camera files.
When you import raw files, the software translates raw data from the camera sensor into a viewable image, using a rendering Profile.
The Profile option already existed in Lightroom and Camera Raw, but it was way down in the Camera Calibration section and only offered a few basic choices, most of which were based on your camera manufacturer's software.
Now they're at the top of the Edit adjustment panel, and they're more reflective of Adobe color technology than that of the camera maker.
It's important because it's the starting point for any other editing you do, so it makes sense to put the option at the top.
In my recent pro photo software reviews, I've mentioned that Capture One has done a superior job of initial raw conversion—that pictures look better right after you import them and before you make adjustments.
Phase One's software brought out more detail and color than Adobe's blander Standard Profile.
The Profiles in Lightroom go a long way towards rectifying this.
The Profiles come in two main groups: raw and creative.
Choices in the first group are Adobe Raw and Camera Matching, while Creative options include Legacy, Artistic, B&W, Modern, and Vintage.
The raw Profiles only work with raw images, while the last four are special effects that also work with JPG images.
The Browse option shows square thumbnails of each profile, which you can hover over with the mouse to preview them on the main image window.
You can also choose Favorite Profiles to appear in the top group of thumbnails.
Included in the Adobe Raw group are Adobe Color, Monochrome, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait, Standard, and Vivid.
I expect Adobe Color to be the most popular, and it's the default for newly imported photos.
It gets a bit more contrast, warmth, and vividness out of the photo than Adobe Standard, which is the same as the previous version of Lightroom.
For some test shots, particularly in color portraits, I now actually prefer Lightroom's initial rendering to Capture One's, especially when using the Portrait and Landscape Profiles appropriately.
Note that any photos you've already imported will retain the legacy Adobe Standard Profile, which usually yields a less pleasing result than the newer Profiles.
The Camera Matching Profiles simply mimic the camera manufacturer's image rendering.
They're designed to match what you see on your camera LCD or the JPG the camera produces.
I find the latter less pleasing than the Adobe Profiles.
They were either too cool or oversaturated for a Canon 1Ds portrait.
The Monochrome Profile, because it starts from the raw camera image, is a better option than starting with a color Profile and then converting to black-and-white.
Portrait is designed to reproduce all skin tones accurately, while Landscape adds more vibrancy since there are no face tones to worry about distorting.
Neutral has the least contrast, which is useful for difficult lighting situations, and Vivid punches up saturation and contrast.
The Creative Profiles will conjure the notion of Instagram filters for many.
Disappointingly, they have names like Artistic...
