Lightroom Classic 2021

Matthew James Oxlade
Updated on

What is Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom is an industry-standard image post-production software; it’s one of the best I have ever used alongside adobe photoshop. And it provides the ideal environment for photographers and designers. But what is the difference between Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic 2020?

Adobe Lightroom (officially Adobe Photoshop Lightroom) is a family of image organization and image manipulation software developed by Adobe Systems for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and tvOS (Apple TV).

When editing images, the options you get is unbelievable. As in many modern RAW-converters, Lightroom uses the principle of nondestructive editing. Editing in this program is Non-Destructive or Non-Destructive and the original file remains unchanged. This means that information about all the operations performed by the user and settings is recorded in the service file, while the original image is kept unchanged.

It also has a built-in library component, similar to Adobe Bridge, and allows importing/saving, viewing, organizing, tagging, editing, and sharing large numbers of digital images.

Also, when editing, you can add presets which can be found all around the web and can be purchased if you don’t have too much time in editing the images.

The latest version of Adobe Lightroom Classic 2020 is the most fully-featured desktop editing software, supporting RAW and JPG images from all modern cameras.

If you’re comfortable in Adobe Camera Raw, then developing a photo in Lightroom will look very familiar.

Adobe Lightroom’s history

The original idea for the software was developed by an Adobe developer in 2002 and has been completed and incorporated into ImageReady’s software capabilities.

Adobe Lightroom Classic earns PCMag Editors’ Choice award for photo workflow software, and a rare five-star rating.

Adobe no longer offers Lightroom as a one-time purchase, but you can still find version 6 online at third-party stores, and Adobe still updates it with camera support.

The bad news is that you will need to pay Adobe $9.99 per month to be able to do that.

For $5 more per month, current Lightroom subscribers can increase that to 1TB of storage; for new subscribers that option totals $19.99 per month.

Adobe Lightroom Classic is always improving too. New for the February 2020 update is Lightroom Classic’s ability to import Photoshop Elements catalogs and .PSB files. It’s nice to see Elements getting some love from the Creative Cloud club, as it has long seemed a very separate entity.

Lightroom Classic 2020 vs Photoshop?

The main advantage I have seen while adobe Lightroom over adobe photoshop is the image management issue. While I started editing photos in photoshop, you needed an adobe software called Adobe Bridge to manage and batch process images.

Another feature of the Photoshop Lightroom package is the separation of the process of working with pictures into separate stages. Each of them has its own functional module with a corresponding set of tools and palettes of settings. At the end of the work on the image, the user can save his processed version as a separate graphic file.

Lightroom is also much easier to use than Photoshop, which can have more of a steep learning curve. Lightroom CC has the ability to sync developed photos easily between a laptop, iPad and mobile devices, which is the major difference between both applications. When it comes to organizing and developing your photos, Lightroom can’t be beaten.

Lightroom also doesn’t use too much system memory when compared to Photoshop, which will eat up all your ram. The size of the program is significantly smaller than Bridge, it runs faster and takes less RAM.

Another bad news is that once you get Photoshop, you will probably need to get additional education and possibly third-party tools as well, which translates to additional investment of time and money.

What’s the difference between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC

The software is also available on mobile devices, but they don’t have extensive features as the desktop versions and Lightroom presets are formatted differently.