Lightroom CC vs Lightroom Classic

Lightroom CC is a designed for a ‘web first’ approach where your images are stored on Adobe’s Creative Cloud servers so that all of them are available everywhere. Adobe’s storage is not free. You’ll need to upgrade to the higher-tier Photography Plan with 1TB subscription to start with, and if you don’t keep on top of your growing library you will probably need to upgrade your storage in future, which will cost more again.

Lightroom Classic is the new version of the ‘old’ Lightroom. Your images are stored locally on your own computer’s disk drives, and while you can synchronise images in a more limited way with Adobe’s Lightroom Web and Lightroom Mobile tools (see the next section), Lightroom Classic takes a ‘desktop first’ approach where online synchronisation is a useful add-on rather than being central to the whole software.

Lightroom CC’s web-first approach means paying a higher subscription to use Adobe’s online storage, but it also means all your images are available everywhere, in their original format and at their full resolution. Lightroom CC is fully integrated with Adobe’s web and mobile apps, so that you don’t just see all your photos, they’re displayed in the same Collections across all your devices – your organisational system is preserved too. But it comes at a cost, and you are reliant on an Internet connection to access full resolution versions of images not cached locally on your computer.

Lightroom Classic can synchronise images too, but in a different and more limited way. First, you can sync Collections, but not your whole catalog, so you don’t get to see your entire catalog online or in your mobile app. Second, it only synchronises a lower-resolution Smart Preview. It’s enough for on-screen display, social media and editing – any editing changes you make are synchronised back to the original image in the Lightroom catalog on your computer. At the moment, Lightroom Classic’s Smart Previews don’t seem to count towards the limited storage allocation you get with the regular Photography Plan.

Lightroom CC initially lagged behind Classic for editing tools but now the gap has been closed. Since Adobe added the HDR pano merge feature to both versions of Lightroom, there’s now little difference. Lightroom CC does not have the Color Range masking option for local adjustments that you get with Lightroom Classic CC, but this feels like a pretty small difference.

Lightroom Classic may have few advantags in editing tools now, but there remain some big differences in how photo editing is handled in a broader way, where Lightroom CC has restrictions and limitations that anyone considering migrating over from Lightroom Classic might hard to live with, notably Virtual Copies and external editors – the next two sections go into more detail.

Lightroom CC is a ‘non-destructive’ editor, like Lightroom Classic. All the adjustments you make are saved as processing ‘instructions’ which changed, removed or added to at any time. One big advantage is the idea of ‘virtual copies’ , but Lightroom CC does not have this.

Lightroom Classic does support Virtual Copies, so you can try out many different effects and styles on the same picture without having to duplicate the original image and take up additional storage space. If you’re used to having Virtual Copies in your workflow, Lightroom CC could prove limiting.

Lightroom CC does not support plug-ins and the only external editor it supports is Photoshop. If you want to use plug-ins, the only way to do it is to open an image in Photoshop and launch the plug-in from there. It also means you’ll need a Photography Plan that includes Photoshop to be able to use an external editor at all.

Lightroom Classic CC supports external editors and plug-ins, and many plug-in publishers now include Lightroom support as a matter of course. It’s perfectly straightforward to ’round trip’ an image from Lightroom Classic to Photoshop, Affinity Photo, the DxO Nik Collection plug-ins, Alien Skin Exposure, Skylum Luminar 3 or a host of other programs.

Lightroom CC is much slicker to use than Lightroom Classic. The organising and editing tools are in a single window and there are no separate ‘modules’. The editing tools are presented in a more modern, minimal design that’s a lot more efficient. However, part of the reason the organisational tools look simpler is because a lot has been taken out.

Lightroom Classic is based around a series of modules: Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, Print, Web. Having to keep swapping between the Library and Develop modules for organising and editing can be annoying, and you might not use the other modules at all. These feel like a throwback to an earlier time, and feel overdue for retirement or replacement.

Lightroom CC‘s search tools are both simpler and arguably more adaptable than Lightroom Classic CC’s (see ‘Keywords and searches’ below), but you can’t use them to create Smart Collections, because they’re not supported. Regular ‘manual’ Collections are the only type on offer, so if you want to carry out searches you’ll have to do it using the Filter bar or the keyword search field.

Lightroom Classic offers in-depth image search tools that can also be used to create Smart Collections – Collections based on search criteria rather than images being added manually. This is such a common tool in programs of this type you might take it for granted that you’re going to get it in Lightroom CC too – but you don’t, and this may hamper your usual image organising system.

Lightroom CC offers more basic options in the Filter Bar. It will be fine for simpler everyday searching, but it can’t match Lightroom Classic’s ability to drill down through camera data.

Lightroom Classic‘s filter bar is much more powerful than Lightroom CC’s, offering all the same basic filter options but allowing you to drill down into multiple layers of camera shooting information.

Lightroom CC supplements manual keywording with its own ‘automatic’ keywording system, using Adobe’s AI-based Sensei technology to identify objects within images so that you can search for ‘boat’, or ‘mountain’, or many other generic object types and be shown matching images in your library based on their content rather than keywords you’ve added.

Lightroom Classic takes a traditional approach to keywording. You apply keywords manually and you can then search for keywords or use them as criteria for Smart Collections. It doesn’t have Lightroom CC’s useful Sensei search technology, but it supports the full range of industry-standard IPTC metadata and is much better suited to professional image management.