Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC

Lightroom moves to the cloud as part of a radical overhaul

From $9.99 per month (Creative Cloud subscription) From Adobe, adobe.com Needs OS X 10.11, internet connection

Lightroom has been popular with pro photographers for years. The desktop version, now called Lightroom Classic CC, is still available, with little changed from the previous version (6.5). Alongside it, however, is a new, cloud-focused app, which has now assumed the name Lightroom CC. Although it has many of the core features of the “old” Lightroom, it’s been given the “prosumer” treatment, with more advanced tools removed and more focus on automation.

The biggest change is that Lightroom now insists on uploading your originals and edits to the cloud, with storage space based on your subscription tier. There is an option to also store originals locally, but not to ignore the cloud. So at best you’re keeping one copy locally and one remotely. This is good for backup, but those who regularly shoot hundreds of gigabytes of raw images are going to have to pay to upgrade their storage.

This change is mostly aimed at letting you work across devices, and to this end the iOS Lightroom app has been completely overhauled as well, with near feature parity with the Mac and Windows apps. Uploading to the cloud is automatic, so all your edits are available on every device. All versions now have a stripped-back interface with editing and correction tools sliding in from various panels. The tools are still very good for cropping, tonal, and color adjustments. But while they do go beyond the (much improved) tools in Apple’s Photos app on the Mac, many of the more detailed tool options are now missing, which will trouble professionals.

For hobbyists and home users this is less of an issue, and you can still achieve remarkable edits and improvements to photos, create albums, add tags, and share more easily across devices. More advanced users, however, will want to see more flexibility and more fine-grained tools return in future updates.

The bottom line. A great cloud-focused app to edit, tag, and share images. Advanced users will find it lacking.

Edits remain live across all devices, so you can start working on one device and finish on another.

You have to use the cloud for storage, though there’s also an option to store copies locally in addition to remotely.