Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic/cc
From £9.98/$9.99 per month
photoshop’s original partner in crime
Lightroom is an all-in-one image cataloguing, Raw processing and editing program that makes the perfect partner for Photoshop. Lightroom can take care of all your organizing and image enhancement needs while Photoshop tackles the complex pixel-based processes.
Lightroom has the same editing tools as Adobe Camera Raw, including powerful lens and perspective corrections, local adjustments, tone and colour tools, effects, plus support for plug-ins and external editors. If your main work is photo enhancement rather than manipulation, you might not need Photoshop at all.
But Adobe has made things more confusing by splitting the ‘old’ Lightroom, now called Lightroom Classic, for regular desktop storage, and introducing a new, trimmed Lightroom CC which stores your photos online. With Lightroom CC you have to pay for Adobe Cloud storage – 1GB is about £10/$10 per month, and there are now three Photography Plans to choose from.
Performance
Lightroom can slow down with bigger catalogues, but it’s powerful and effective. Its Raw conversions (as with Adobe Camera Raw’s) aren’t the best, proving a fraction softer and noisier than Capture One’s and Dxo’s, but it has the widest support for camera Raw formats and automatic lens correction profiles. Lightroom CC offers the ease of having your whole image library available everywhere, but the storage costs are high and the software lacks key features you might take for granted in the desktop version.