Adobe Photoshop lightroom classic/cc
Photoshop’s perfect partner in crime has changed… now there’s two of them to check out! (PC/MAC) from £9.98/$9.99 per month
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 everyday organizing and image enhancement needs while Photoshop tackles the complex pixel-based processes that Lightroom can’t.
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 off the ‘old’ Lightroom, now called Lightroom Classic for regular desktop storage, and introducing a new, slimmed-down Lightroom CC which stores all your photos online. With Lightroom CC you have to pay for Adobe Cloud storage, starting at 1GB at around £10/$10 per month, and there are now three Photography Plans to choose from.
Performance
Lightroom can slow down with bigger catalogs, but otherwise it’s powerful and extremely effective. Its Raw conversions (as with Adobe Camera Raw’s) aren’t necessarily 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 convenience of having your whole image library available everywhere, but the storage costs are high and the software itself lacks some key features you might take for granted in the desktop version – it doesn’t support plug-ins, for example, and only Photoshop as an external editor.