PROS
Excellent photo management and organization
Camera and lens-based corrections
Brush and gradient adjustments with color and luminance masking
Face detection and tagging
Plug-in support
Connected mobile apps
Adobe’s Lightroom is unquestionably the leading professional photo-workflow software. The one question is, which Lightroom should you use? The photo software is now available as two separate applications: the consumer-targeted Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, reviewed here. Lightroom Classic offers professional photographers a powerful way to import, organize, and correct everything they shoot. The June 2021 update adds a lot of pro presets, Super Resolution upscaling, Apple Silicon M1 support, and live view for Nikon tethering. Other recent updates include local hue adjustments, a Texture slider, and the Enhance Details tool, along with interface tweaks and performance speedups. The program earns a rare five-star rating and a PCMag Editors’ Choice award.
Though there are excellent competing products such as ACDSee Pro, CyberLink’s PhotoDirector, DxO’s PhotoLab, and Phase One’s Capture One, none equal Lightroom Classic’s combination of smooth workflow interface, organizers, and adjustment tools. HDR tools and panorama-stitching tools, improved performance, face recognition, a mobile app, and cloud integrations are also at your disposal, along with top-notch lighting, color, geometry, and lens-profile based corrections.
A Tale of Two Lightrooms
With the release of the rethought Lightroom, the program photo pros have come to know and love got a younger, and frankly, still fairly immature sibling. Lightroom does offer simpler, cleaner interface, but it lacks some expected tools—including the ability to print and plug-in support. Pros will want to stick with the subject of this review, Lightroom Classic, the true heir to the Lightroom throne that offers every bit of the franchise’s functionality. Lightroom, on the other hand, is more suited to consumers and enthusiasts who want everything available from the cloud—since the newer program requires you to upload all images to its cloud storage before you can edit.
Setup and Pricing Options
A Creative Cloud Photography subscription (which costs $9.99 per month) gets you not only Lightroom Classic, but also the full version of Adobe Photoshop (which alone used to cost up to $999), along with 20GB of online storage. Adobe no longer offers Lightroom as a one-time purchase, and no longer updates pre-Creative Cloud versions—if you see one for sale (the last perpetual license was for version 6), run the other way, since you’ll be paying for obsolete software that won’t support recent camera models.
To install Lightroom, you need an up-to-date OS, as it only runs on Windows 10 (Version 1903 or later), or on macOS 10.14 or later. It now runs on Apple Silicon M1-based Macs, but not on Windows 10 on ARM, though Lightroom (non-Classic) does. The Windows version requires 64-bit operating system versions.
You install and update the program through the Creative Cloud utility that sits in the Taskbar; you’ll need a fast Internet connection or lots of time for getting started, as it takes up nearly 2GB of drive space. You also have the option to download a full-featured 7-day trial (Adobe has reduced this from the previous very generous 30-day trial).
When I first ran Lightroom, a ball icon bounced over to the software nameplate, showing that clicking on it opens a three-choice dropdown menu. This is where you turn on and off face detection and address lookup for GPS coordinates. A cloud panel appears at top right, showing your remaining cloud storage amount and syncing status.
Interface, Import, and Organize
Unlike Corel AfterShot Pro and Lightroom, Lightroom uses separate modes for organizing (Library), adjusting (Develop), and other program functions. You can turn the mode entries on and off at top left (and even change their font). By default, modes now include Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, and Web. A nameplate appears at top left when you sign in for syncing your photos with Lightroom Mobile and Lightroom.com.
Lightroom has a big, ever-present Import button and media auto-detect that launches the nondestructive importer. This lets you see thumbnails and full-size images on memory cards even before you import them. External media is by default selected in the Files section, rather than in the Devices section, which Adobe claims is faster. Lightroom lets you start work on any photo in the set before all the import processing is done. Usually, you’ll want to import photos as camera raw files, which offer more control over the final images. Lightroom supports camera raw file conversion for every major DSLR and high-end digital camera.
Lightroom imports pictures using a database, which Adobe calls a catalog . The database approach makes sense for photographers with huge collections of large images, and you can store the database file separately from the actual image files. This is helpful if you want to store them on external media or a NAS. At import, you can either Copy, Copy as DNG (Adobe’s universal raw camera file format), Move, or Add. During import, you can have the program build Smart Previews for faster editing, ignore duplicates, add to a Collection, or apply a preset such as Auto Tone.
Lightroom Classic can now import Photoshop Elements catalogs and .PSB files. It’s nice to see Elements getting some love from the Creative Cloud club, as it has long seemed a very separate entity. PSB files are like PSDs (Photoshop Document), but the B stands for big, since these files can be up to 512 megapixels and 65,000 pixels wide. Note that you need to check the Maximum Compatibility box when saving in Photoshop for the Lightroom import to work. You can now choose which monitor is used for preview and which for controls, if you have a multiple-monitor setup.
Another way to get photos onto your computer is to tether it. Mostly of use to pro photographers, tethering lets you connect your camera with a USB or FireWire cable and actually control the shutter release from the computer. ACDSee and CyberLink PhotoDirector, by comparison, offer no tethering capability, though Capture One does. In its February 2019 update, Lightroom Classic got faster tether transfers for Nikon SLRs to catch them up with the improvements made for Canon updates, and the June 2021 update adds live view for Nikon tethering. You can control ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and white balance in the software.
In Library mode, double-clicking takes you between thumbnail and screen-fit view, and another click zooms in to 100 percent. Zooming, unfortunately, is limited to Fit, Fill, and ratios like 1:3, and 1:2, and it doesn’t make good use of the mouse wheel, as many other photo editors do. You can use a touch screen to pinch-zoom to any level you like—something I was thrilled to see in testing on my Acer T232HL touch-screen display. There’s even a touch interface with large controls, which you can enable by tapping a finger icon.Lightroom’s Library mode offers unmatched organizational abilities, including the ability to group pictures into Quick Collections of thumbnails you select, and Smart Collections of photos that meet rating or other criteria. Star rating, flagging, and rotating can also be done from within the thumbnails. You can use Quick Develop tools in the Library mode for lighting fixes or preset effects (B&W, Cross Process, and the usual Instagram-like suspects). A lot of new presets created by professional photographers arrived in the June 2021 update, in categories including Portraits (for Deep, Medium, and Light Skin), Style (including Cinematic, Futuristic, and Travel). I’d prefer descriptive terms, however, rather than numerical designations like FT10, FT02, FT03, and so on, for the names of the Futuristic presets, for example.One basic fix you can’t do unless you move to Develop, however, is cropping, but you can hit the R keyboard shortcut to get right to the cropper, which offers aspect ratio presets and leveling, as well.Lightroom has long let you create custom presets, but you can now create ISO-adaptive presets. Take, for example a situation in which you have several photos shot at ISO 2000, for which you want a certain level of noise reduction; but for ISO 800 shots you want a lower level. The option lets you automatically apply the adjustment you want based on ISO. To get the feature to work, you need to select two or more photos with different ISO levels. The adjustment then applies the correction on a sliding scale, so, for example, if you apply it to a photo with ISO 1250, the setting is in between the two you set. You can even use this preset as a default for your raw camera files.
Another useful tool in Library mode lets you click on thumbnails to apply either metadata or adjustment presets. The program also does a good job of making it easy to compare images side by side. A Survey mode lets you select several images for larger comparison views, and the loupe tool magnifies spots for close work.
Face Detection
Like its enthusiast-level sibling, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom offers face detection and recognition. You can get started with the feature either by clicking on the software nameplate at top left and choosing Face Detection from the dropdown, or you can click on the face icon in the toolbar in Library mode to enter People view. That’s actually a little more hidden than I’d like: There’s no entry in the left pane with Collections and Catalog, and a Faces mode view would be nice, to go along with the Map mode.
You can start finding faces in your entire catalog or to only find faces on an as-needed basis:
To test this, I chose the first option, and the program began detecting faces right away. It built a grid of unnamed people, stacking those that it detected as being close enough to be considered one and the same person. It’s interesting how a person in the same session but with a different expression sometimes isn’t included in his or her stack.
Once it’s done detecting, you type a name into the box with a question mark below the photo or stack, and it pops right up into the Named People section. Once you name a few, Lightroom proposes names for unnamed face shots. You just hit the check mark if it’s correct. It’s one of the smoothest and simplest implementations of people tagging I’ve seen. Adobe has clearly studied how other apps do this and come upon a great interface and process. This time I tested it, it claimed several nonhuman images—patterns in shrubbery—had faces. If you only have a couple named faces, it can match some wildly off other faces for the name, so a bit of training is required. It also has trouble with profiles and faces partially hidden by hats and other clothing, and as you’d expect, paintings, statues, and Memoji are also detected as faces.
Once faces are tagged, you can always get to them by tapping the same face icon in Library mode, but I wish you could also easily create smart albums based on peoples’ names or even use a People mode as you can use Map mode. Face detection might seem like a consumer feature, but pros who shoot events with lots of faces could certainly make good use of it.
Sharing Photos
Not only does Lightroom continue to support many output options for which plug-ins are available, but built-in support for Flickr and Facebook also makes uploading to those popular sources easy. Facebook and Flickr comments and likes and are visible right inside Lightroom. Very cool. You can also upload video directly to these services or share a photo via email with a right click.
One export option is to submit your images for sale on Adobe Stock. The export plug-in for this is installed by default. To start submitting your work, you need not only a Creative Cloud account, but also a Stock contributor account, which is pretty easy to set up and just requires ticking a few checkboxes.
After that, submission is a simple matter of dragging photo thumbnails to the Adobe Stock Publishing Service area in Library mode, and then describing them on the website. Adobe automatically tags recognized objects like buildings, which makes it even easier. The hardest part came right when I went to submit my first batch of photos. You have to scan an ID that proves your age. A few of my upload attempts for this were rejected. But who knows? You may finally make some money from your hobby.
Lightroom doesn’t support the desktop operating systems’ built-in share features, since it’s not a UWP app.
Mobile Apps
For Creative Cloud subscribers, Adobe offers mobile apps for iOS and Android, and they keep improving and taking more advantage of the platforms’ new capabilities. Lightroom for iPad now supports split-screen mode, and in the Lightroom for iPhone app, 3D Touch is supported, and you can shoot with live filters enabled. Its Pro mode lets you manually set focus, white, balance, and shutter speed, and ISO—pretty nifty. The key reason for the apps, though, is to be able to edit photos in sync with the desktop program. They do this admirably. For more details, see the linked reviews above.
Lightroom uses your graphics processor for photo adjustments such as exposure, distortions, radial filters, crop, and panning. The February 2020 update added acceleration for Lens Correction and Transform adjustments, and subsequent updates have added even more performance improvements, with the June 2021 update focusing on speeding up the process of selecting and updating metadata for multiple images. If you have a decently powered PC, you shouldn’t be detained too long with any Lightroom operations, which isn’t the case for the slower Corel PaintShop Pro (though that has improved recently), Skylum Luminar, and Zoner Photos Studio.
In previous reviews, I expressed a wish that Adobe would improve the app’s import speed, as importing raw photos into Lightroom was still time-consuming compared with the competition from Phase One and CyberLink.For Classic, the company claims an improvement in import speed, and indeed, now that speed is on a par with and even a little better than the competition. For a quantifiable result, I tested import speed with 190 raw images (a total of 5GB) from a Canon 80D. My test computer was a 64-bit Windows 10 PC with 16GB RAM, a 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-6700 CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 745 discrete graphics card. I imported from a Class 4 SD card to a fast SSD on the PC. Adobe Lightroom Classic took 3:51 (minutes:seconds ). By comparison, Capture One 20 took 4:55, and Zoner Photo Studio took 4:54, and Skylum Luminar headed up the rear at 5:03. Some photo apps, such as DxO PhotoLab, don’t bother with an import process at all, and simply let you work on pictures wherever they are stored; it’s up to you to organize them after editing.
Stick With a Classic
Lightroom Classic, already at the top of the class, has only gotten better with the addition of raw import Profiles. Its top-notch organization features; lens-profile-based corrections; noise and chromatic aberration adjustments; Healing Brush; and other tools make it indispensable for the professional photographer. Lightroom earns its reputation as a well-loved program that’s long been the choice of pro and prosumer photographers, despite the company’s imposition of a subscription fee and now forking the product into two separate apps. Adobe Lightroom Classic earns PCMag Editors’ Choice award for photo workflow software, and a rare five-star rating. If you’re more into photo projects without the deep tech, check out fellow Editors’ Choice Photoshop Elements, and for those wanting the ultimate in noise reduction, there’s DxO PhotoLab.
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