Lightroom Classic
Prefer the old Lightroom? It carries on as Lightroom Classic
Lightroom CC may have the convenience of full cloud storage, but Lightroom Classic is the one with the most editing power, and is still the best bet for photographers with a large, locally stored image catalogue.
If you’ve used previous versions of Lightroom you’ll be right at home with because little has changed. If you haven’t used Lightroom before, however, it’s worth explaining the interface and workflow .
First, Lightroom is based upon an image catalogue, a searchable database of all the photos you import. This is where it gets its power and flexibility, which is much greater than a simple folder browsing tool like Adobe Bridge.
Organization, searching and filtering
When you import photos, you don’t necessarily have to move them from their current location – Lightroom can keep track of them, and shows all your photo locations in its Folders panel. But it can also organize your photos ‘virtually’ using Collections.
The search tools are very powerful and can be used in a couple of different ways. One is to use Lightroom’s Filter Bar to filter all the photos in the current folder or Collection according to their file type, camera EXIF data (camera model, lens, ISO, exposure and more), rating, flags, colour labels and keywords. Lightroom CC (previous page) has a Filter Bar too, but it’s not as powerful as the Classic version’s.
You can also create Smart Collections, which are essentially saved searches. You choose your search criteria and then the Smart Collection will display all the images in your catalogue that match those criteria.
Editing tools
The Lightroom Classic editing tools are found in the Develop module, and while they don’t support layers and complex selections like Photoshop does, they do practically everything else, ranging from tonal adjustments to colour tweaks, Clarity and Dehaze effects, black and white conversions, split toning, lens corrections, perspective transformations, vignettes, sharpening and noise reduction.
Lightroom also has local adjustment tools, which include an Adjustment Brush, Graduated Filter and Radial Filter masks. New in this version are colour and luminance masking options, which restrict your adjustments to specific colour or brightness ranges. The colour range option is very effective, and the next best thing to being able to make magic wand selections.
Lightroom’s real strength lies in the way it can edit Raw files seamlessly alongside JPEGS, TIFFS or Photoshop files, without having to put them through a conversion process first.
Currently, Lightroom Classic still has tools and features that the new Lightroom CC lacks. However, the program’s slick and slimmed-down interface makes Lightroom Classic’s look seem rather oppressive and fussy.