Lightroom Classic is an all-in-one photo cataloguing, organising and editing tool that is based around the original Adobe Lightroom and desktop image storage. It’s one of the most popular and widely used photo editing applications on the market and is available alongside Adobe Photoshop as part of the subscription based Adobe Photography Plan.
Minimalism, brutalism and architecture, three of my favourite things. So when I got the chance to spend a week in a converted WWII bunker, I spent much of my time exploring the objects, compositions and lighting in this strange but extraordinary environment.
It was a dark, blustery day in May. Bournemouth, on the UK’s southern coastline, was not looking its best. But I didn’t want to try to glamourise it, I wanted to make this place look exactly how it felt on that day – only more so.
Adobe Lightroom is not one program but three. You could easily call it an ecosystem. At heart, it’s a tool for both organizing your photos and editing them. So how do you get it, what does it cost, and which version do you need?
As of January 2025, Adobe is no longer offering its regular 20GB Photography Plan subscription to new users at its old $9.99/month price tier. Existing subscribers can continue to use it, though at an increased cost of $14.99/month. But for new users, there is now only the 1TB Lightroom Plan (now $11.99/month) and the 1TB Photography Plan ($19.99/month – as before).
The Noise Reduction and Sharpening sliders might be the obvious go-to tools for optimizing high-ISO images, but these can easily leave you with soft, wishy-washy detail or exaggerated noise as you try to play one off against the other. In fact, there are better ways to get your high-ISO images looking smoother and sharper.
The Hasselblad XPan was a classic 35mm ‘panoramic’ camera developed in partnership with Fujifilm. What made it special was its unique widescreen aspect ratio, creating images measuring 65mm x 24mm on 35mm film. You can recreate this unique perspective in Lightroom, together with some of the XPan’s analog rendering. Here’s how.
Lightroom Classic has built-in lens correction profiles for fixing distortion and corner shading in countless camera lenses. It also fixes chromatic aberration, or color fringing, via a separate checkbox. The one thing it doesn’t have is corner softness correction – but there is a way around that.
I’m drawn to extreme contrasts in lighting, which I guess a lot of photographers are. This gets me into trouble, though, because very often a scene will have a wider dynamic range, or brightness range, than the camera can capture.
It’s easy to convert a color image to black and white in any photo editor, Lightroom included, but to get a strong black and white look you often have to do a little more besides. Here’s a look at the B&W mode, B&W panel and the Tone Curve.
What’s wrong with this photo of a boat on a shingle beach? I used a prime lens with a wide maximum aperture to get a shallow depth of field effect for this simple composition and that part has worked well. But the boat is just a little too dark and the sky is a little too bright. This is a common issue in outdoor photography.