These are the top questions about Lightroom on the Internet right now, and some quick and simple answers which will hopefully be useful.
They do the same job, organising and editing large collections of photos, and they share most of the same tools. However, there is a fundamental difference in where images are stored that makes them completely different. Lightroom stores photos in the cloud and you need to pay extra for storage; Lightroom Classic stores them on your computer.
Read more: Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic
No it can’t. It can display them and play them back (pretty jerkily in my experience) but if you want to edit them you’ll need Adobe Premiere Pro, Premiere Elements or some other video editor.
It certainly can. In fact it can edit them directly alongside regular JPEGs without having to use any extra process. This seamless RAW editing is central to Lightroom’s appeal.
Yes it can, whether they are captured on the mobile device, copied across from a camera via Wi-Fi or cable, or whether they have been synced to the mobile device from a desktop computer.
Yes it can. Lightroom probably has the best and widest support for different RAW formats of any photo editing software, and that includes Fujifilm RAF files. The only exceptions are likely to be when a camera is so new that Adobe has not yet had time to develop and add support – but this is typically within days, or maybe a couple of weeks.
It can run in less than 4GB on my computer if it’s not being asked to do very much, but that’s not the same as running on a machine that has only 4GB of RAM because the operating system and other apps and utilities will swallow up their share. 4GB RAM would be a tall order for Lightroom, 8GB is a more practical minimum but often you need 16GB just for a bit of operating headroom.
No it can’t, but there are quite possibly Lightroom plug-ins sold separately that I don’t know about that can detect duplicates.
No. That’s a task that requires an old-school photo editor like Photoshop that supports image layers and sophisticated selection and masking tools. If you have Lightroom on the Adobe Photography Plan you will have Photoshop too, and it’s easy enough to send a photo from Lightroom to Photoshop for editing and then back again.
It uses non-destructive editing to change the appearance of a photo without changing the photo itself. Your changes only become permanent if you export a new, processed version of the photo. Non-destructive editing limits some of the tools you can use but it does mean you can go back later at any time to change your adjustments.
Lightroom catalogs are simply a database of photos that stores thumbnails and previews and adjustments. Each photo in the catalog is linked to the ‘real’ photo on your computer. The catalog is important and precious because it contains all the information you add to your photos and all the editing adjustments you make.
Lightroom can use Photoshop as an ‘external editor’ and will probably be configured that way by default. You can right-click an image to edit in Photoshop and Lightroom will then create a new version of the image which then opens in Photoshop. When you’ve made your changes in Photoshop and save the photo, the edited version is automatically returned to your Lightroom catalog.
You can use Lightroom for practically any everyday photo corrections and enhancements and a wide range of creative effects and local adjustments. Only use Photoshop for complex layered composite images or sophisticated and detailed retouching.
Read more: Lightroom vs Photoshop
Lightroom presets are a set of adjustments saved for re-use in the future. They may be as simple as a curves adjustment, or they may be a complex combination of white balance, color and tonal adjustments and even local adjustments. Lightroom comes with some preset as standard but you can create and save your own or download/buy presets made by others.
In the Develop module in Lightroom Classic, make a series of adjustments that you want to re-use in the future. Then click the ‘+’ button at the top of the Presets panel in the left sidebar and choose a name for your preset, the adjustments you want to include and where to save it in your presets list.
Some are, some aren’t. There are some software companies, websites and photographers that give away free presets, often as samples for commercial collections or simply as free resources alongside their main products.
Yes and no! There are lots of free presets around that are OK but nothing special and a few free presets that are rather good. A lot of photographers and designers sell paid for presets, but these vary in quality too. The answer is that they can be worth the money, but don’t count on it.
Definitely not. If you choose the Adobe Photography Plan, which is the cheapest way to get Adobe’s photo editing programs, you get both, but they do two very different jobs. Lightroom is for organizing your image library and regular photo editing, Photoshop is for in-depth image manipulation, composite images and illustration.
Read more: Lightroom vs Photoshop
That’s a good question. It would be difficult to copyright a set of adjustments that anyone else could have combined (and that’s all presets are), and many people will re-use and adapt presets designed by others. However, selling other people’s presets as your own would be illegal.
They are stored in a separate set of folders outside the catalog folder. You can find them by opening the Lightroom preferences, clicking the Presets button and then using the buttons to show the presets folder locations.
That’s an ethical question. I would say not, because creative people all take inspiration from other creatives as they develop their own look. It might feel like cheating to be apply to apply a whole set of complex adjustments with the click of a button, but why do a dozen things manually just for the sake of it?
You’ll find the option to add a watermark in the Lightroom export settings. A number of preset export settings are available and you can edit any of them to add a watermark option, or create a new one.
Only up to a point. Lightroom does not have a blur tool as such, but you can create a sort of background blur by selecting your subject with the local adjustment tools and then reducing the Clarity setting for the background. To do the job properly, though, you really need an external program like Photoshop or a plug-in.
If you want to be able to see and edit your images anywhere, on any device, use Lightroom – but it will cost you around $10 per month for the 1TB storage plan. If you want to store and edit your images on a computer, get Lightroom Classic – it also has more powerful organizing tools.
Read more: Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic
This is the traditional version of Lightroom that stores and edits photos on your computer. This is the version that’s likely to be most popular with photographers because it’s the most powerful and doesn’t require expensive cloud storage.
Read more: Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic
You shouldn’t delete any of them. The only expendable ones are the previews.lrdata files, which can be pretty massive, but that simply means Lightroom will have to recreate all those previews again when you visit the folders and collections in your catalog.
The About option in the menus will tell you, but it’s an academic question since Lightroom is only available on a subscription plan these days and it will be kept up to date automatically. If you have the last non-subscription version, Lightroom 6, then good luck to you, as that’s well out of date. If your question is about Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic, look at the application icon. ‘Lr’ is Lightroom (the web-based one), ‘LrC’ is Lightroom Classic (the regular desktop one).
Read more: Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic
If you definitely only want Lightroom, there is a $10 Lightroom plan that includes 1TB cloud storage. However, the most useful plan for most people is the regular Photography Plan, which includes Photoshop and both versions of Lightroom, also $10 per month. If you want the 1TB storage to go with this, that will be another $10 per month.
Read more: Adobe Photography Plans
It can keep a large photo collection organised and searchable, and it can also carry out almost all of the photo editing, enhancing and correction jobs that once needed a program like Photoshop. You may still need Photoshop for certain tasks, but Lightroom may well take care of 95% of the things you need to do with your photos.
Read more: Lightroom review | Lightroom Classic review
Lightroom is typically used by photographers as a kind of ‘digital hub’ for their whole photographic workflow. If they need to do anything to an image that Lightroom can’t do, which is becoming increasingly rare, they can launch a ‘plug-in’ tool or ‘external editor’ from directly within Lightroom.
It’s here already. It was released in June 2021, so if you have auto-updates enabled you will be running it already.
Lightroom 1.0 was launched way back in 2007.
That’s a hard question to answer because it depends on your computer’s hardware configuration. Usually you’ll only ask that question when you start to see serious slow-down, and you probably know the answer! On machine, catalogs of 20,000 images or more are noticeably slower.
If you’re talking about Lightroom, they are all stored online on Adobe’s cloud servers, though a percentage will also be cached locally on your computer. If you’re talking about Lightroom Classic, they are typically stored where they always were, and the Lightroom catalog simply ‘references’ their location.
By default, this will probably be in your computer’s Picture’s folder, though you can move it or create new catalogs in any location you like, including on external drives – SSDs are recommended purely for speed, even though they are a lot more expensive.
If you can’t remember where you’ve saved your Lightroom catalog, don’t worry, we’ve all done it. Open Catalog Settings from the menu and in the General tab you’ll see the location of your catalog.
Adobe has hidden it! Actually, it’s renamed and redesigned this feature and it’s now the Color Grading panel, with Shadow, Midtone and Highlight controls. You can still apply split toning simply with the Shadow and Highlight adjustments.
A surprisingly popular question with a (probably) unpopular answer. Only Lightroom Mobile is free to use, but even then its value is limited unless you get a subscription. Lightroom and Lightroom Classic on desktop can be tried out free for a few days, but after that you’ll need to get a subscription.
Read more: Is Lightroom free?
The type of computer doesn’t matter – what matters is whether you want all your images available everywhere (at a cost), in which case Lightroom is better, or whether you want the ‘old’ Lightroom, with photos stored on your computer, which is where you need Lightroom Classic.
It just is. Annoying, isn’t it? A lot will depend on the speed and power of your computer and whether you use hard disk or SSD storage. Mostly, it’s because your catalog has got a bit too big for your hardware setup. Sometimes Lightroom is slow because it’s still generating previews of your images. This happens after a large, bulk import, or if you didn’t have automatic preview generation enabled on import.
Let’s hope not! Calling it ‘Classic’ isn’t a good sign, but Adobe has never given any indication that it intends dropping it.
Yes, because Lightroom mobile is available for both iOS and Android devices. Note, however, that while Lightroom mobile is a lot like Lightroom on desktop, it’s quite different to Lightroom Classic.
