Adobe Lightroom (2025) verdict
Summary
Adobe Lightroom does something pretty amazing. It makes all your photos available to organize and edit anywhere, on any device. But this does come at a cost. One drawback is that you have to pay for Adobe’s Creative Cloud storage, which is now included in its subscription plans. Another is that this version of Lightroom is slicker and more streamlined than the original Lightroom Classic, but also sacrifices some organizational features.
Pros
- All your images in the cloud and available everywhere
- Simplified, streamlined interface
- Cutting edge AI masking tools
- Huge range of presets
- Fast and effective search tools
- Can browse Local folders too
- Now works with external editors
Cons
- Subscription only
- Standard 1TB cloud storage may not be enough
- Organizing options somewhat limited
- No Virtual Copies, only less useful Versions
- Good, but not the best at RAW processing
What is Adobe Lightroom?
Adobe Lightroom, sometimes called Lightroom CC, is a version of Lightroom built around online cloud storage. It’s an alternative to the original Lightroom Classic, which is still available and widely used. The difference is that Lightroom Classic works with images stored on your computer, not in the cloud. Many people prefer Lightroom Classic for this very reason, and it also has more advanced organizational tools.
But what Lightroom does, that Lightroom Classic does not, is to make all your images available anywhere. You can use the Lightroom desktop app for your main editing and organizing work if you like, but there are also Lightroom for Mobile apps you can use on your smartphone or tablet, and these synchronize automatically via the cloud with the desktop app. You can even view and work with your Lightroom photo library in a web browser.
The mobile apps, incidentally, include a camera module, so if you capture content on your smart device, this will automatically be added to your Lightroom library.
Storing all your images online takes a lot of storage space, and Adobe is now including 1TB storage in its Lightroom and Photography Plans. You’ll need it!
The bottom line is that while Lightroom Classic is still the best option for users who prefer local storage and deeper organizational tools, Lightroom offers a much more flexible, accessible and intuitive cloud-based setup.
Will Lightroom one day replace Lightroom Classic? It’s hard to say, but the fact that Adobe now simply calls it ‘Lightroom’ suggests the company thinks this is its key organizational tool and that – perhaps – Lightroom Classic is a ‘legacy’ tool. This is my guess, and Adobe has never said this outright.
Adobe Lightroom: what it costs, how to get it
None of Adobe’s applications can be purchased for a one-off license fee (the one exception is Adobe Photoshop/Premiere Elements). Instead, you must sign up for an ongoing subscription. Many photographers find this unacceptable, and there are subscription-free alternatives such as Capture One and ON1 Photo RAW. When you factor in updates and overall cost of ownership, perpetual licenses aren’t necessarily cheaper.
The cheapest way to get Adobe Lightroom is with the Adobe Lightroom Plan at $11.99/£11.99 per month. This includes not just Lightroom, but Lightroom Classic too, together with 1TB Creative Cloud storage.
If you want Photoshop as well, then you need to step up to the Photography Plan at $19.99/£19.99 per month. This still represents pretty good value for what you get, and particularly when you compare it to what we had to pay in Lightroom and Photoshop’s ‘perpetual license’ days. See below for more information and links.
Adobe Photography Plans
• 20GB Photography Plan: now $14.99/month, no longer available to new users
• 1TB Photography Plan: $19.99/month
• 1TB Lightroom Plan: $11.99/month
* A trial version lasting just a few days is available but requires card details and must be cancelled before the trial expires to avoid automatic subscription
** Note that these are annual plans paid monthly. You may have to pay a cancellation charge if you want to end your subscription before the end of the current year
Adobe Lightroom: key features
I’ve mentioned one key feature of Adobe Lightroom already – its cloud storage. Will 1TB be enough for your entire photo collection? Hopefully yes, provided you watch out for space-grabbing file formats like TIFF files, Photoshop PSD files and the Adobe Enhance DNG files which do such a great job at AI noise reduction.
A couple of early criticisms of Adobe Lightroom have gone away. Before, this cloud-only storage model meant you had to upload files before you could start organizing them. Now, though, there’s a Folders view where you can browse folders on your computer, view and even edit individual photos and choose which folders and photos you want to add to the cloud.
Another is that Lightroom now supports any external editors you might want to use, when previously you could only open images in Photoshop. It doesn’t support plug-ins designed for Lightroom Classic, but provided your external editing tools can work as standalone applications (like all the Nik Collection plug-ins, for example), it’s actually a little more flexible.
You can launch external editors both from the Folders view and with images stored in the cloud. The only thing to be aware of is that the default export format is 16-bit TIFFs, and these are pretty big files, often of 100Mb or more.
You may not need to use any external editing tools because Lightroom’s own editing tools are very good. They are the same tools you’ll find in Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw because they all use the same RAW processing and editing engine.
So for example you can apply all kinds of manual tone, color, sharpening, clarity and other adjustments via the editing panels, and you also have access to all of Adobe’s AI-powered masking tools, which can automatically recognise different objects and areas in your scenes.
There’s also a huge selection of presets for different effects and ‘looks’, and a Lightroom community of other users sharing their own presets and editing ideas. You can create, save and share your own editing presets too.
Lightroom’s organization tools don’t go as deep as those in Lightroom Classic, but it does now support Smart Albums alongside regular Albums, and because your images are stored in the cloud you can use Adobe’s AI Sensei technology to search for specific subjects.
Adobe Lightroom: interface and usability
Lightroom can browse the folders on your computer but only in a limited kind of way. The real organizing work is carried out with images copied to the cloud.
This is where Lightroom’s organization tools feel very different to Lightroom Classic’s. When you copy images to the cloud they all go into one large ‘pot’. There is no folder structure at all, which many users might find a bit disconcerting initially.
Instead, you can use a combination of Lightroom’s Albums, Smart Albums and search tools to organize and find your photos. You still don’t get the sense that images exist in a single, specific location, but it’s not too hard to adapt to this way of working.
With Albums, you select the image you want to include manually, while with Smart Albums you choose the search criteria you want the Smart Album to use, such as the camera or lens used, keywords, ISO setting and more, and the Smart Album is populated automatically.
You can create folders and subfolders to store both Albums and Smart Albums if you like a visible filing system, or you can do the opposite and simply use the search bar at the top of the screen to type in what you’re looking for. Lightroom will suggest search criteria as you type.
The editing tools are very straightforward to use and accessed in ‘Detail’ mode. Lightroom does not have the other modules in Lightroom Classic, such as ‘Web’ and ‘Slideshow’ which are probably little used today anyway.
All of Lightroom’s adjustments are non-destructive, so you can go back at any time in the future to modify them, remove them or add new ones. It doesn’t offer the option to create Virtual Copies like Lightroom Classic does, which is a shame. You can create ‘Versions’ stored within each image, but you have to know they are there and you need to open the image to select them. This updates the image thumbnail.
Overall, Lightroom does feel slicker and simpler to use than Lightroom Classic. Its integration of organizing and editing tools and its non-destructive editing make it feel more novice-friendly than Adobe Photoshop Elements, say.
Adobe Lightroom: results
Adobe Lightroom offers a very comprehensive set of image adjustments and its masking tools are especially advanced. These include brush and gradient tools for regular adjustments and a strong set of AI masking tools for automatically identifying and masking your main subject, the background, the sky and other objects and areas in the scene. As with other AI masking tools, Adobe’s do product fairly tightly defined masks so that if you carry out very heavy adjustments the results can look artificial, and if you want to achieve realistic-looking tonal gradations in skies, for example, you might need to blend a sky mask with a regular gradient mask, but overall Lightroom’s AI masking tools are about as good as they get right now. The people/portrait masking options are especially strong.
On top of this you can choose from a huge range of one-click presets for practically any kind of look you can imagine, and these are available as standard with Lightroom, from other preset makers and via the Lightroom Community.
On the other hand, Lightroom’s RAW processing, while good, is not the best. Its default RAW processing is a little noisy compared to the best of its rivals, notably DxO PhotoLab and PureRAW, and Capture One. The detail rendering is decent but perhaps not quite as good as the others, and if you increase the sharpening to compensate you get more noise again.
Lightroom does have a very good Enhance feature for denoising noisy images. This produces a new, larger DNG image file alongside the original RAW file, though, so if you do this a lot it could start to eat into your 1TB cloud storage.
There are some editing jobs that Lightroom can’t do, and where you might need an external program like Photoshop for layers and composites, or the DxO Nik Collection for analog effects like borders, blur effects, light leaks and more. For the many photographers, however, Lightroom could well be the only editing software they need.
Adobe Lightroom verdict
Lightroom’s key strength is its cloud-based storage and its all-your-images-available-everywhere approach. For some photographers this will be the killer feature they’ve been waiting for, and Lightroom does this brilliantly, both with its desktop app, its fully synchronized mobile apps and even its web-based tools.
It also has a much slicker, more streamlined interface than Lightroom Classic, which looks and feels quite complicated by comparison.
Lightroom is also fantastic for mobile creators, since it fuses mobile content captured on smartphones with regular camera content saved to the desktop. It all ends up in a single Creative Cloud library.
However, it’s not good if your current image library already takes up more than 1TB of local storage – mine, for example, is around 1.5TB. Adobe does not offer off-the-shelf plans for more than 1TB, though you could probably fix something up by speaking to an agent.
Lightroom is also less than ideal if you have a very detailed, rigorous filing system that you’ve spent years developing and won’t translate easily to Lightroom’s simpler approach. Perhaps the most annoying thing, though, is that it doesn’t support Virtual Copies, so you can’t display multiple versions of the same image to browse them side by side or store in different Albums.
Adobe Lightroom is an excellent, largely unique tool for storing your image library online so that it’s available everywhere, where all your edits are synchronized across all your devices. But if your workflow is based around a desktop computer or laptop and you have a large image catalog that you are happy to store and edit locally, then Lightroom Classic is a much better fit.
