Adobe’s Lightroom photo editing software has long been a favorite among professional photographers. The app now comes in two flavors: Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. The first is intended for serious amateur photographers and web pros who want to access their photos online and use powerful editing and organizing tools. It’s also loaded with help, tutorials, and community features. The other, Lightroom Classic, retains the program’s traditional interface and tool set for working professional photographers. At this point, Adobe has added most of the older app’s features to the newer app, bringing it up to parity with Classic. The newer Lightroom still lacks local printing, tethering, and plug-in support, among other things, so veteran pro users will want to stick with Lightroom Classic, an Editors’ Choice winner.

Conversely, Lightroom now has some features not found in Classic, particularly tools that are likely to interest amateur consumer photo enthusiasts. A standout among them is the Discover photo sharing community, where people can upload their (PG-rated) images for others to see and even “remix” them with their own edits. Only recently has the software gotten red-eye removal and side-by-side comparison view.

The latest update for October 2022 saw the addition of some Photoshop-like tools: Content-Aware Remove and masking auto-selection for people, things, and backgrounds. They arrived in Lightroom Classic at the same time, and users of both apps may no longer need to round-trip their images to Photoshop as a result. The workflow-focused Lightroom products were in the past more about correcting an entire image, while these new tools allow for localized adjustments.

How Much Does Lightroom Cost?

You have at least three options when buying 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. Another option is to get all three programs (and many more) with a full $52.99-per-month Creative Cloud subscription, which comes with 100GB of cloud storage (upgradeable to 1TB for an additional $9.99 per month). All the plans include Adobe Portfolio, which lets you create a web showcase for your photography.

Similar Products

5.0

Exemplary

Adobe Lightroom Classic

$9.99/Month

See It

at Adobe

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our Adobe Lightroom Classic Review

5.0

Exemplary

Adobe Photoshop

 

Check Price

 

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our Adobe Photoshop Review

4.0

Excellent

Adobe Photoshop Elements

$99.99

See It

at Office Depot® & OfficeMax®

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our Adobe Photoshop Elements Review

4.0

Excellent

DxO PhotoLab

$129.00

See It

at DxO US

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our DxO PhotoLab Review

4.0

Excellent

Corel PaintShop Pro

$69.99

See It

at Amazon

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our Corel PaintShop Pro Review

4.0

Excellent

CyberLink PhotoDirector

$74.99 Per Year

See It

at CyberLink

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our CyberLink PhotoDirector Review

4.0

Excellent

Capture One Pro

$24 Per Month

See It

at Capture One

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our Capture One Pro Review

4.0

Excellent

Skylum Luminar Neo

$149.00

See It

at Luminar

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our Skylum Luminar Neo Review

3.5

Good

Adobe Photoshop Express

$0.00

See It

at Adobe

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our Adobe Photoshop Express Review

3.0

Average

ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate

$89.95

See It

at ACDSee

(Opens in a new window)

Read Our ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate Review

At about $120 per year, Lightroom is more expensive in the long run than competing photo software such as ACDSee Photo Studio ($99.99), Capture One ($299), CyberLink PhotoDirector ($99), DxO PhotoLab ($129–$199), Corel PaintShop Pro ($79), and Skylum Luminar ($99). 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 term, Lightroom is 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.

Lightroom’s cloud storage 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 productivity 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, with the first 15GB free; that also includes Google Photos’ reasonably powerful editing, organizing, and sharing tools.

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-app-update setting saves you from worrying about whether you’re running the latest version.

The software runs on macOS Big Sur (version 11.0) or later and Windows 10 20H2 or later (including Windows 11). It now supports both Apple Silicon M1 and Windows on Arm platforms. The Lightroom app takes up 1.5GB on my hard drive, half a gigabyte less than Lightroom Classic.

The Lightroom Interface

Lightroom sports a refreshing, clean interface. It features 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, Discover, All Photos, and Albums. The Learn screen shows new tutorials along with a row of your photos thumbnails. You’ll spend most of your time in All Photos, where you select and edit images. All Photos has useful filters that let you find Recently Added, Recent Edits, as well as photos By Date and People (using face recognition). There’s also a Connections option under All Photos, where you manage online share 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. 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 All Photos or one of its subcategories, 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%. Afterward, 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, and now you also get a side-by-side before-and-after view.

The program doesn’t make especially good use of the mouse wheel. Zooming in and out using 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’ll have to do some relearning, since Z on that means zoom, and R means crop, while Lightroom non-Classic uses the more intuitive C for crop.

A fairly new feature 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 you 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.

A surprisingly recent addition to the Lightroom interface is a side-by-side comparison view, something long found in most pro photo editing software, including Lightroom Classic. It’s nicely implemented in the newer program, with a clear two-rectangle icon. But there’s a fatal flaw. Unlike in other software like DxO PhotoLab, the view in Lightroom doesn’t offer a before-and-after-edits view. If you want that, you have to duplicate an image and then set up the side-by-side view.

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 Book.

Lightroom includes a boatload of help and tutorial content. Click the question mark at top right to get started. You get 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 example, for an outdoor portrait, it aptly proposes the tutorial called Enhance Natural Light Portraits by Improving Contrast and Color. I welcome having this guidance built right into the app. By contrast, all Lightroom Classic’s help is web-based.

For users who aren’t old hands at image correction and enhancement, the program’s animated sample editing steps can be of great assistance 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

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 as Classic has, but with the new Lightroom, you have to press + Add Photos 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.

After an import, all the images are automatically uploaded 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 that you don’t want uploaded. For the ability to exclude images from uploading to the cloud, look to Lightroom Classic.

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 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 than it used to be; Adobe claims the latest update speeds import using compatible graphics hardware.

At import, you can choose to add images to a specified 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 Settings. You can use a custom preset you created yourself as a default at import, as well. But most good photo apps let you decide on any preset applications in the import dialog. And 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 may not be practical to apply at import, however.

I tested import performance with 200 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 1650 discrete graphics card. Lightroom took 175 seconds for the import, this time, a little better than my previous result of 182 seconds. It’s still a little behind Lightroom Classic and On1 PhotoRAW, which both took 170; Capture One was the quickest, as the table below shows. Note that the Lightroom (non-Classic) import time doesn’t include completing uploading the images to the cloud, just importing to 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 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 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 01, Modern 04, and so on. I’d prefer names that give a clue about what the effect does rather than numbers. By contrast, Alien Skin Exposure offers many, many presets, every one of which has a descriptive name. Despite that quibble, the Creative Profiles really do add interest and feeling, usually without being too obvious. In some cases, they’re a one-step improvement. It’s also impressive how varied the 17 B&W choices are.

Organizing Photos

The search bar in Lightroom uses AI to let you find particular objects—dogs, mountains, buildings, and more—and even suggests searches based on what you start typing. I like the filter option that lets you select camera models, keywords, and locations, but Lightroom Classic and DxO PhotoLab go beyond that, letting you filter by lens, F-stop, focal length, or even ISO. Just tapping in the search box offers helpful filter tools, even people.

You can organize your Lightroom collection with albums, star ratings, and Pick and Reject flags. You don’t get color labels, as you do with ACDSee Pro and CyberLink PhotoDirector. Nor do you get Smart Collections like those that Lightroom Classic can create, based on dates and tags. You can, however, add keywords, though the entry system doesn’t have Lightroom Classic’s hierarchical keyword suggestions.

People Recognition

The People view uses AI in the cloud (dubbed Sensei) to automatically detect faces in your photos—a useful organization capability. These show up in circles in My Photos view. All shots of what the AI considers the same person are grouped together. You add a name to groups you’re interested in. You can merge circles that show the same person, since, as with all people-recognition software, some duplicates show up, thanks to differing camera angles, eyewear, lighting, and so on.

Lightroom does a good job identifying and grouping people. I’m impressed with how it asked, correctly, if it should merge images of the same person with dark glasses and in profile view. One issue that longtime Lightroom users will run into is that the feature is completely separate from the People feature in earlier versions of Lightroom. People you tagged in those won’t appear in Lightroom’s People feature, even if the photos are synced to Adobe’s cloud.

Adjusting Images

Nobody likes to admit that they use the Auto button to see if the program can improve their photos automatically, but everyone uses it. The button in Lightroom is easier to find than it used to be, and it shows you exactly which sliders it has adjusted (Lightroom Classic does that, too). In my testing, it was good at fixing underexposed photos, but often applied too much of an HDR look or overly brightened a photo that was already bright. Even when I searched using the term “bright,” it would further brighten the photo that another part of the app had deemed bright. To be fair, a snowfield test shot with hazy mountains was nicely dehazed and not brightened.

You get all the expected lighting adjustment sliders: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks. Lifesavers Clarity and Vibrance are also present in Lightroom. Dehaze is also available, and mostly works well, though DxO PhotoLab’s ClearView does a better job without adding color casts in some test photos. The Point Curve adjustment is a nice twist on the standard Curves control (which the program includes). You can adjust the curve targeted to a point in your image by dragging the mouse up and down.

The Texture slider—still the program’s newest slider—lets you add or remove medium detail, as opposed to the fine detail that the Sharpen adjuster affects. You can use Texture as either a global or local adjustment. You can also use it to smooth faces without giving them an artificial, doll-like look. In the image below, increasing the Texture slider adds detail but doesn’t affect noise in the sky the way Sharpen does.

And in the following example, the left is the original, and the right has Texture set to -30:

For some reason, you can’t use the mouse wheel to increase and decrease the adjustment slider positions as you can in Classic (I like to do this) and there’s no history panel showing all your changes. I do like that double-clicking a slider returns it to its original position. The Revert to original button is hidden under the overflow menu. I’d rather have it always accessible.

Not to be confused with Profiles are Presets—adjustments made after importing with Lightroom’s editing tools and sliders. Recommended Presets offer the promise of producing a brilliant image with but a single mouse click. The feature uses AI to analyze your image, comparing it with photos that have similar histograms and subjects and then presents a panel of thumbnails showing the preset applied. You can specify whether you want Subtle, Strong, B&W, Bright, Dark suggestions. As you hover the mouse over a thumbnail the main view of the image changes to the new look. The presented presets can be created by pro photographers or just other Lightroom users.

You can now use the Amount slider with any preset, whether it’s one included in Lightroom or created by you or another user. Something I really like about this is that you can slide the Amount above the default 100%, rather than just being able to reduce the effect, as is the case with some other similar tools, most notably Google Photos and Instagram.

There’s also a decent selection of presets designed by professional photographers. You get a choice of color, black and white, grain, and vignette preset adjustments, and you can see the effects applied to your image as you hover the mouse cursor over them. Photoshop Elements offers more options and control with its filters, however.

Cropping is well implemented, with a good choice of preset aspect ratios, and there’s even an Auto-leveling option. With the June 2021 update, the crop tool finally lets you create custom aspect ratio presets, and the following update added Crop Overlays such as Thirds, Golden Ratio, and Center which provide guides to help you line up your crop. The same tool also helpfully offers Auto straightening, to level your landscapes.

Local Adjustments

As in Lightroom Classic, Lightroom has a Masking panel, with Subject, Sky, and Background options, Classic’s Color Range and Luminance Range selection tools are in non-Classic Lightroom as well. The October 2022 update added some new masking features, particularly regarding the masks you get when using Subject.

Subject Select works extremely well, and you can correct any missed selections with a Subtract or Add button, either of which can use any of the local selection tools—Brush, Gradient, and so on. It can, however, get a little confusing when you Add to or Subtract from a Subtract brush selection, the latter of which amounts to adding to the original selection. You can now add or remove from a selection just part of a person, like eyebrows (below), facial skin, or lips.

Sky Select also worked quite well, though it included some water under a bridge in one shot.

You can paste subject and sky masks to multiple images, and for each the program creates an appropriate mask, rather than dumbly copying the original. You can also now invert masks, including multiple masks, with one button press.

The Healing Brush, an Adjustment Brush, and Linear and Radial Gradients tools are pretty much the same as those in Lightroom Classic. A local hue adjustment brush is helpful, for example, if a face is overly red but you don’t want to reduce the red channel in the rest of the photo.

Red-eye removal finally arrived in the June 2022 update. Though most photos taken recently don’t have this problem, Adobe was getting guff from users about not including a tool that’s in just about ever other photo app. The red eye remover uses AI to make it a one-step fix—no hunting for and selecting every single iris in the shot. The tool is an option in the Healing tool (with the bandage icon). It worked perfectly in testing. Now Adobe just needs to add a pet eye fix like that found in some apps, including its own Photoshop Elements.

Even newer for the Healing panel is Content-Aware Remove. Here’s how the tool looks before it works its magic:

And here’s the result:

I like that you can enlarge and reduce the brush size with the mouse wheel, and you can select a different source area to replace the removed object by dragging the mouse cursor while holding down the Ctrl key.

Detail Editing

Thankfully, you do still get noise reduction, and it works well, as does the automatic chromatic aberration correction. For even worse fringing, Defringe lets you finish fixing purple and green discolored edges that the basic chromatic aberration fix misses. You can either use a dropper or choose a color shade (purple or green) from a slider control. In testing, the tool also did an excellent job. Those are a couple of tools you don’t get with the free consumer apps. If you want superpowered noise reduction, check out DxO PhotoLab. Another more advanced tool that you get in Lightroom but not in free photo apps is its Geometry distortion correction based on lens profiles.

Editing Videos

Don’t mistake Lightroom for full-fledged video editing software, which lets you join, split, and overlay clips. With Lightroom (as with Photoshop), you can simply trim the start and end of a single video clip, but you can also apply any lighting and color adjustments as well as presets—even AI Recommended and Premium presets.

Note there are some tools you don’t get for video content, such as Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze. Nor do you get any Detail settings (sharpening, noise reduction) or Optics or Geometry corrections. And finally, you can’t use the Masking or Healing tools.

To trim a clip, you need to head to the Crop and Rotate tool, which is renamed in context-sensitive fashion to Trim and Rotate. You can indeed rotate the video as well as flip it from left-to-right or top-to-bottom. You don’t get the auto-level tool you can use with photos, however.

Panorama and HDR Merge

Lightroom has some photo-merging capabilities, including Panorama, HDR, and HDR Panorama. The HDR Merge tool offers just three options: checkboxes for Auto Align and Auto Settings (auto-enhance), and a slider for de-ghosting. The latter is to remove moving objects from the merge. You don’t get all the options after the merge that you do with Alien Skin Exposure, such as B&W and Artistic, but that will be fine for those who just want a light-balanced image.

The panorama-merging tool is similar to that in Lightroom Classic, and produces a good, seamless result. As in Classic, you get options for spherical, cylindrical, and perspective projection modes. The Fill Edges option impressively uses AI to stretch the image edges so you don’t have to crop. You also have the option to Auto crop to remove non-rectangular edges.

Enhance Details and Super Resolution

Enhance Details uses machine-learning support in Windows and macOS to clarify complex parts of an image. It’s a subtle effect, and, for many photos, it doesn’t do a whole lot, especially for parts of the photo that have a consistent texture. You access Enhance Details from the Photo menu (or from a right-click menu), and then you see a dialog with a detail view of your shot. Running it creates a new DNG file. There’s an estimate of how long the process will take, but in testing the tool took quite a bit longer to complete than the estimated 10 seconds—more like a full minute.

On some early tries it also caused the program to quit unexpectedly, and on a 50MB NEF file from a Nikon D850, I got an error message saying that the image couldn’t be loaded. As noted, the effect is subtle. If you zoom in, you see some pixel differences. I thought that when looking at the whole image at 1:1 magnification, there was an impression of greater sharpness, but several colleagues couldn’t see any difference. On some shots, the difference wasn’t noticeable at all, and on some, it was only noticeable at 2:1 magnification. It might make a meaningful difference in a large print, however.

The shot below has Detail Enhance enabled on the right. Still, I’m not convinced that it has 30% more detail. PCMag camera expert Jim Fisher tried the feature in the macOS version on his 5K iMac and found similarly minimal results.

A related feature is Super Resolution, which is meant for improving old, low-megapixel images. You simply choose Photo > Enhance, and check the Super Resolution box. Unlike the Enhance Details tool described above, Super Resolution works on JPGs. It also produces results in DNG format. I’m not a fan of the AI-generated results. It looks like paint strokes are applied to the image. That said, the tool does smooth out pixelation.

Sharing and Output

Sharing and output remain weaknesses for Lightroom. Most consumers who use Lightroom will likely want to share their photos to a few common places: email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Flickr. They also may want to print their photos. Lightroom offers none of those options. The lack of printing capability is particularly flabbergasting, in that the app has been updated several times since its release.

Though you still can’t print directly from the program, you can send photos to Blurb for book printing and to Printique or WHCC (White House Custom Colour) for wall art. There’s still no way to get handheld photos printed, aside from exporting images and uploading them to a photo printing service or printing them yourself using your operating system’s printing features. The built-in options throw you out to your web browser. Lightroom Classic is stronger in every way here.

Output choices have, however, increased. You can now save to DNG and TIF formats as well as saving JPGs and original raw files with a sidecar XMP settings file. There are differing views on DNG, but it uses less storage and includes metadata and edits without requiring a sidecar file. Since Lightroom syncs everything to cloud storage, the only reason I can think of for exporting to DNG is for backing up and archiving.

You can also upload to Adobe Portfolio web galleries. Lightroom’s online galleries present the images well and allow sharing via a link. These allow multiple contributors, each of which can add their own photos to your albums. The online galleries let you permit or disallow downloading, EXIF viewing, and location viewing.

Unlike in Lightroom Classic, there’s no right-click option here to email the current photo as you can in Classic, but you can now get a shareable link to the photo online and invite viewers by email. You can also send images to SmugMug and Adobe Portfolio from right-click options, as well as to a few printing services.

You can’t convert your pictures to many different file types, as you can in Corel PaintShop Pro. So, if you need a PNG or GIF, look elsewhere. Ditto for soft proofing. At least you can now rename the file at export. You can, however, specify a pixel measurement for the longer side of the image.

The watermarking feature lets you choose a font, style, rotation, color, and even drop shadow. You can now also use a graphic image file in your watermark, too. It’s a welcome addition for those who like to publicize their brand.

Collaborative Editing

Another Share option is to Invite a contact to collaboratively edit your photo. From the Share menu you choose Invite People, where you can specify whether you want the invited person to be able to view, contribute, or contribute and edit the photos in an album.

But the sharing option that Adobe’s emphasizing most lately is Share to Discover, found in the Community section. It submits your photo along with all your adjustments to Adobe for inclusion on the Discover tab. There, you can also follow contributors, save their edits as presets to use on your own photos, and tap a heart icon to show your admiration.

Discover includes the Allow Remixing option, which means letting any Lightroom user on the internet edit your photo. You’re notified when someone submits an edit, and a toggle lets others save your edits as a Preset.

Discover now has a search feature, where you can find users and photo subjects just as you can with your own collection.

Mobile App and Website

As a mobile app, Lightroom is more impressive than its desktop counterpart. In fact, it even boasts the People and Profiles features, along with a slider control for the Upright, Guided Upright, and Geometry tools.

All the same photos you see synced in the desktop app also appear in the mobile app, and you even get the gradient and brush selective editing. You can pick a specific color to use with the brush and gradient tools—particularly useful for skies. It also includes chromatic aberration correction and effective noise reduction.

You can set the app to automatically upload anything shot on the phone to your Lightroom cloud storage, and you can search, filter, and tag your photos. In addition to all those post-shot options, you can use the in-app camera, which boasts exposure compensation with a simple swipe and a White Balance tool. It also has an HDR feature, and best of all, saves the result as a raw file. In all, it’s a great mobile photo app. It’s available as both an Android app and an iOS app, and both work identically. I tested on an Apple iPhone X. iPhone users, in particular, will find the app’s raw file saving important, since recent Android OSes can save raw camera files without third-party apps.

Lightroom’s web galleries bear a strong resemblance to the newer Lightroom application. In fact, the left organization panel shows the same list of albums, but its Add Photos option is in a different place, above the photo collection. You can also create new albums in the web interface. If you share a photo, you can choose a layout and get a single URL to share an album publicly. A dashboard shows you your recent albums, imports by month, and stats, such as how many photos, albums, and videos you’ve added.

You also get online editing, including the Light, Color, and Effects tools. You don’t, however, get the Detail, Optics, or Geometry corrections. There are a couple of Technology Previews you can opt into, such as Auto Tone and Best Photos, which uses AI to detect your photos with the best lighting and composition. Other differences between the installed and web versions include controls on the latter not working well with touch, the very slow loading of editing tools, and a lack of before-and-after viewing.

What’s Missing From This Version of Lightroom?

Though its capabilities have been growing with updates, this version of Lightroom is still missing some key functionality found in the Classic product.

I’ve already mentioned the inability to control what’s synced, the lack of local printing, robust file conversion, color label organization, and sharing options. Additionally, there’s no plug-in support and no tethered shooting capability. You can’t view EXIF or IPTC data, and there is no slideshow creation, photobook layout, or geo-tagged map view.

Lightroom Lite

With the new Lightroom’s usability, mobile syncing, and community features, it should appeal to those looking to up their photography game rather than to pro photographers. Adobe is continually adding features, and Lightroom is certainly more powerful than most of its competition. Pros will miss some Lightroom Classic capabilities, however, and getting consumers to pay $120 per year for it could be a hard sell for nonprofessionals.

Pro photographers who don’t need plug-in, printing, and tethering support will be well served by the new Lightroom. But those who need those features or don’t want to upload all their images should stick with Lightroom Classic, our Editors’ Choice winner among photo workflow software and consider Capture One. Hobbyists may be better served by Adobe Photoshop Elements, also an Editors’ Choice winner, or the excellent CyberLink PhotoDirector. For total detailed image manipulation without the workflow features, our Editors’ Choice winner is Adobe Photoshop.