Adobe Lightroom – Review 2021

Adobe’s Lightroom photo software has long been a favorite among professional photographers. They now have a choice of flavors: Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. The first (the subject of this review) is primarily designed for serious amateur photographers who want to access their photos online and use some powerful editing and organizing tools. Lightroom Classic retains the program’s traditional interface and toolset for working professional photographers. Adobe has been gradually adding features to bring the newer sibling up towards parity with Classic. Unfortunately, the new program still lacks local printing, tethering, and plug-in support—among other things. Veteran users will want to stick with Lightroom Classic, a PCMag Editors’ Choice pick.

Features that arrived after the program’s initial release include the ability to export to the DNG raw file format, drag-and-drop support for Albums, keywords for shared albums, and keyword auto-completion. It now has watermarking, local hue adjustments, versions, and collaborative editing. Both Lightrooms now have a Texture slider and an AI-powered Enhance Details tool, as well as the newer Super Resolution tool that debuted in Photoshop earlier.

The nifty Profiles feature offers treatment options for converting raw camera files into viewable images; those determine the starting point of your editing journey. Some creative Profiles that are similar to Instagram filters join the Raw Profiles, and those can be used on JPGs as well as raw images. Lightroom now has panorama and HDR-merging capabilities. At this point, the simpler Lightroom offers nearly all the actual image-editing tools found in Lightroom Classic, save Post-Crop Vignetting, Profile calibration, and Flat-Field correction—all quite advanced options. More notable missing-in-action features concern organization, workflow, and output.

How Much Does Lightroom Cost?

You have at least three options when buying the newer Lightroom. The Lightroom plan runs $9.99 per month and includes 1TB of online storage, but with that plan you don’t get Photoshop. The Photography plan, also $9.99 per month, gets you Lightroom, Photoshop, and Lightroom Classic, but it only includes 20GB of cloud storage. Getting the full package with 1TB online storage costs an additional $10 per month. Of course, you get all three programs (and many more) with a full, $52.99-per-month Creative Cloud subscription, though that only comes with 100GB of cloud storage (upgradeable to 1TB for an additional $9.99 per month). All of the plans include Adobe Portfolio, which lets you create a web showcase for your photography.

At about $120 per year, Lightroom is more expensive in the long run than competing photo software such as ACDSee Ultimate ($99), Capture One ($299), CyberLink PhotoDirector ($50), DxO PhotoLab ($129-$199), Corel PaintShop Pro ($79), and Skylum Luminar ($69). Keep in mind, too, that those are one-shot prices: Pay once and you own the software forever, unless a major upgrade you want comes along. Even in the short run, it’s double the price of Zoner Photo Studio, which has a $4.99-per-month subscription (or $49 per year) with 20GB cloud storage, and that program keeps working if you stop paying—you just won’t get future updates.

In terms of cloud storage, Lightroom is also pricey compared with other services. A terabyte of OneDrive storage costs about half a Lightroom subscription, at $69.99 per year, and that includes photo syncing along with all the Office productivity apps. For the same $9.99 per month as Lightroom, Apple’s iCloud gives you 2TB—twice as much as Adobe. Google Drive also charges $9.99 for 2TB, but if you don’t mind saving compressed versions of your photos, you can upload everything for free.

Installing is a simple matter of tapping Install in the Creative Cloud utility. Another way to get Lightroom is from the Microsoft Store on Windows or the Mac App Store on macOS. With either installation option, an auto-app-update setting saves you from worrying about whether you’re running the latest version.

The software runs on macOS 10.14 or later and Windows 10 version 1903 or later. It now supports both Apple Silicon M1 and Windows on ARM platforms. The Lightroom app takes up 1.3GB on my hard drive, half a gigabyte less than Lightroom Classic.

The Lightroom Interface

Lightroom sports a refreshing, clean interface. It features what Adobe product director Tom Hogarty calls “progressive disclosure,” meaning it starts out simple and then reveals increasingly complex tools as you need them. The interface now has four buttons along the left rail: A plus sign for adding photos, Home, My Photos, and Sharing. The Home screen shows new tutorials along with a row of your photos thumbnails. You’ll spend most time in My Photos, where you select and edit images. You can switch that to a contact-sheet view and sort by import date, capture date, or modified date.

With this radical rethinking of Lightroom, Adobe ditches the modes of its predecessor: Library, Develop, and the rest. Aside from the rows of your synced photos, the interface is notably sparse. Organization and adjustment tools are hidden behind box and control slider icons at the left and right edges, respectively. The organization panel and adjustment panel don’t show at the same time: By default, when you open one, the other closes. Thankfully, you can change this behavior in Preferences by switching the panels from Automatic to Manual.

In My Photos, Double-clicking on a thumbnail in the tile view opens a photo in full view, and double-tapping again takes you back to the gallery view, just as in Lightroom Classic. Tapping the full photo view (the cursor appears as a plus sign) enlarges the image to 100 percent. After this, the cursor changes to a hand, letting you drag the image around. At the bottom right, there are also Fit, Fill, and 1:1 choices. There’s a Show Original button, but no side-by-side before-and-after view such as you get in Lightroom Classic. You can use the mouse wheel while holding down Ctrl to zoom in and out, but this only stops at major points like fit, fill, and 1:1; you don’t get a zoom slider showing you the percent, as you do in CyberLink PhotoDirector.

New for the June 2020 update is the ability to create edit versions, so you can compare two or more edit processes. You simply tap the Versions option at the bottom-right of the adjustments panel, and a Versions panel pops out to the left of the adjustments, giving easy access to your multiple versions. One thing to note is that you can’t edit a version; once you create it, its adjustments are fixed, though you can continue editing with your edits in place for another version, and you can, as always, use Ctrl-C to copy edit settings from the version.

As for touch input, Lightroom is adequate: You can easily use its buttons and controls via touch, and you can tap or unpinch a photo to zoom it to the last level. Lightroom Classic (as well as Photoshop) features a full touch mode for tablets and touch-screen PCs such as the Surface Book.

Lightroom includes a boatload of help and tutorial content. Click the question mark at top right to get started. There’s animated visual help on all the individual adjustments, along with wizards that use sample images from noted photographers to show exactly how they edit an image; it even shows their adjustment slider settings. The help is context-sensitive: For an outdoor portrait, it aptly proposes the tutorial called Enhance Natural Light Portraits by Improving Contrast and Color. I welcome having this kind of thing built right into the app. By contrast, all of Lightroom Classic’s help is web-based.

For users who aren’t old hands at image correction and enhancement, the program’s animated sample editing steps can be of great assistance in getting them started on a photo editing journey. The edit guides show the effect of each adjustment in sequence. Of course, nothing is stopping you from simply messing with the sliders to get a look that suits your taste. Still, not everyone needs to reinvent every wheel.

Importing Images

Neither Lightroom nor Classic pops up as an Auto-Play option when you insert an SD memory card. I like to have a big Import button always handy, but with the new Lightroom, you have to press the + button and then choose the source folder or card. When you import pictures from a camera card, you see a grid of all the card’s images; unlike previous versions of Lightroom, this iteration doesn’t let you view a photo at full size before importing it.

When you import, all the images are automatically backed up to Adobe’s servers. Hands-off people will probably appreciate this, but I’d prefer more control over what’s uploaded. You can pause uploading, but you can’t specify folders and files you don’t want uploaded. For the ability to exclude images from uploading to the cloud, look to Lightroom Classic. Also look there (or even to the Windows Photos app) for automatic importing from folders you specify.

The import process has long been one of the pain points of Lightroom: Many have complained on photo forums and blogs about how slow it is. I personally also hate wasting upload time and storage space with images I may not want to save. Professionals with loads of RAID storage probably want everything imported, but they also want it to happen fast. To be fair, importing is now faster in Lightroom (and also in the recently updated Classic).

At import, you can choose to add images to a specified album, and as of the June 2020 update is the ability to choose a default raw import setting, however. This lets you not only choose a standard raw import option such as Adobe Color, but you can alternatively choose an effect-like default such as the Vintage Instant Creative. You can use a custom preset you created yourself as a default at import, as well.

I tested import performance with 190 raw files from a Canon 80D to my Windows 10 PC with 16GB DDR4 RAM, a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-6700 CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 745 discrete graphics card. Lightroom took 5:04 for the import, which was on the high end for the field. For comparison, Skylum Luminar took 5:03. Lightroom Classic took 3:51, Capture One took 4:55, and Zoner Photo Studio took 4:54. Note that the Lightroom (non-Classic) import time doesn’t include completing uploading the images to the cloud, just importing into the local application.

Raw Profiles

If you really want to get the most editing potential out of your digital camera, you’ll import raw camera files. When you import raw files, the software translates raw data from the camera sensor into a viewable image, using a rendering Profile.

The Profile option already existed in Lightroom and Camera Raw, but it was way down in the Camera Calibration section and only offered a few basic choices, most of which were based on your camera manufacturer’s software. Now they’re at the top of the Edit adjustment panel, and they’re more reflective of Adobe color technology than that of the camera maker. It’s important because it’s the starting point for any other editing you do, so it makes sense to put the option at the top.

In my recent pro photo software reviews, I’ve mentioned that Capture One has done a superior job of initial raw conversion—that pictures look better right after you import them and before you make adjustments. Phase One’s software brought out more detail and color than Adobe’s blander Standard Profile. The Profiles in Lightroom go a long way towards rectifying this.

The Profiles come in two main groups: raw and creative. Choices in the first group are Adobe Raw and Camera Matching, while Creative options include Legacy, Artistic, B&W, Modern, and Vintage. The raw Profiles only work with raw images, while the last four are special effects that also work with JPG images. The Browse option shows square thumbnails of each profile, which you can hover over with the mouse to preview them on the main image window. You can also choose Favorite Profiles to appear in the top group of thumbnails.

Included in the Adobe Raw group are Adobe Color, Monochrome, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait, Standard, and Vivid. I expect Adobe Color to be the most popular, and it’s the default for newly imported photos. It gets a bit more contrast, warmth, and vividness out of the photo than Adobe Standard, which is the same as the previous version of Lightroom. For some test shots, particularly in color portraits, I now actually prefer Lightroom’s initial rendering to Capture One’s, especially when using the Portrait and Landscape Profiles appropriately. Note that any photos you’ve already imported will retain the legacy Adobe Standard Profile, which usually yields a less pleasing result than the newer Profiles.

The Camera Matching Profiles simply mimic the camera manufacturer’s image rendering. They’re designed to match what you see on your camera LCD or the JPG the camera produces. I find the latter less pleasing than the Adobe Profiles. They were either too cool or oversaturated for a Canon 1Ds portrait.

The Monochrome Profile, because it starts from the raw camera image, is a better option than starting with a color Profile and then converting to black-and-white. Portrait is designed to reproduce all skin tones accurately, while Landscape adds more vibrancy since there are no face tones to worry about distorting. Neutral has the least contrast, which is useful for difficult lighting situations, and Vivid punches up saturation and contrast.

The Creative Profiles will conjure the notion of Instagram filters for many. Disappointingly, they have names like Artistic 01, Modern 04, and so on. I’d prefer names that give a clue about what the effect does rather than numbers. By contrast, Alien Skin Exposure offers many, many presets, every one of which has a descriptive name. Despite that quibble, the Creative Profiles really do add interest and feeling, usually without being too obvious. In some cases, they’re a one-step improvement. It’s also impressive how varied the 17 B&W choices are.

Organizing Photos

The search bar in Lightroom uses AI to let you find particular objects—dogs, mountains, buildings, and more. As of Version 2, it suggests searches based on what you start typing. I like the filter option that lets you select camera models, keywords, and locations, but Lightroom Classic and DxO PhotoLab go beyond that, letting you filter by lens, F-stop, focal length, or even ISO.

As for the AI object search, that’s already available in Flickr, Microsoft Photos, Google Photos, Apple Photos, and Adobe Photoshop Elements. At this point, it’s not a differentiator. My favorite implementation of this is that of Flickr, since it actually shows you the automatically generated object keyword tags—which all its competitors hide—and even lets you edit them.

You can organize your Lightroom collection with albums, star ratings, and Pick and Reject flags. You don’t get color labels, as you do with ACDSee Pro and CyberLink PhotoDirector. Nor do you get Smart Collections like those that Lightroom Classic can create, based on dates and tags. You can, however, add keywords, though the entry system doesn’t have Lightroom Classic’s hierarchical keyword suggestions.

Adjusting Images

Nobody likes to admit that they use the Auto button to see if the program can improve their photos automatically, but everyone uses it—if only to see what the program recommends. I like that the button in Lightroom is easier to find, and that it shows you exactly which sliders it’s adjusted (Lightroom Classic does that, too). In my testing, it was good at fixing underexposed photos, but often applied too much of an HDR look or overly brightened a photo that was already bright—even when I searched using the term “bright” it would further brighten the photo that another part of the app had deemed bright. To be fair, a snowfield test shot with hazy mountains was nicely dehazed and not brightened.

You get all the expected lighting adjustment sliders: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks. Lifesavers Clarity and Vibrance are also present in Lightroom. Dehaze is also available, and mostly works well, though DxO PhotoLab’s ClearView does a better job without adding color casts in some test photos. The Point Curve adjustment is a nice twist on the standard Curves control (which the program includes). You can adjust the curve targeted to a point in your image by dragging the mouse up and down.

The Texture slider—still the program’s newest slider— lets you add or remove medium detail, as opposed to the fine detail that the Sharpen adjuster affects. You can use Texture as either a global or local adjustment. You can also use it to smooth faces without giving them an artificial, doll-like look. In the image below, increasing the Texture slider adds detail but doesn’t affect noise in the sky the way Sharpen does.

And in the following example, the left is the original, and the right has Texture set to -30:

For some reason, you can’t use the mouse wheel to increase and decrease the adjustment slider positions as you can in Classic (I like to do this) and there’s no history panel showing all your changes. I do like that double-clicking a slider returns it to its original position. The Revert to original button is hidden under the … overflow menu; I’d rather have it always accessible.

As with nearly all photo apps these days, Lightroom lets you apply filter effects, via the Presets link at the bottom of the window. The June 2021 update beefs up these, with 70 presets designed by professional photographers. You get a good selection of color, black and white, grain, and vignette preset adjustments, and you can see the effects applied to your image as you hover the mouse cursor over them. Photoshop Elements offers more options and control with its filters, however.

Cropping is well implemented, with a good choice of preset aspect ratios, and there’s even an Auto-leveling option. With the June 2021 update, the crop tool finally lets you create custom aspect ratio presets.

A Healing Brush, an Adjustment Brush, and Linear and Radial Gradients tools are happily available, in pretty much the same form as those in Lightroom Classic. These allow you to do local adjustments to specific areas o the image. New for the June 2020 update is a local hue adjustment brush, which is helpful, for example, if a face is overly red but you don’t want to reduce the red channel in the rest of the photo.

Thankfully, you do still get noise reduction, and it works well, as does the automatic chromatic aberration correction. For even worse fringing, Defringe lets you finish fixing purple and green discolored edges that the basic chromatic aberration fix misses. You can either use a dropper or choose a color shade (purple or green) from a slider control. In testing, the tool also did an excellent job. Those are a couple of tools you don’t get with the free consumer apps. If you want superpowered noise reduction, check out DxO PhotoLab. Another more advanced tool that you get in Lightroom but not in free photo apps is its Geometry distortion correction based on lens profiles.

People Recognition

The People view uses AI in the cloud (dubbed Sensei) to automatically detect faces in your photos. These show up in circles in My Photos view. All shots of what the AI considers the same person are grouped together. You add a name to groups you’re interested in. You can merge circles that show the same person, since, as with all people-recognition software, some duplicates show up, thanks to differing camera angles, eyewear, lighting, and so on.

Lightroom does a good job at identifying and grouping people; I am impressed with how it asked, correctly, if it should merge images of the same person with dark glasses and in profile view. One issue that longtime Lightroom users will run into is that the feature is completely separate from the People feature in earlier versions of Lightroom. People you tagged in those won’t appear in Lightroom’s People feature, even if the photos are synced to Adobe’s cloud.

Panorama and HDR Merge

Photo-merging capabilities came in with the February 2019 update of Lightroom. These include Panorama, HDR, and HDR Panorama. The HDR Merge tool offers just three options: checkboxes for Auto Align and Auto Settings (auto-enhance), and a slider for de-ghosting. The latter is to remove moving objects from the merge. You don’t get all the options after the merge that you do with Alien Skin Exposure, such as B&W and Artistic, but that will be fine for those who just want a light-balanced image. The panorama-merging tool is similar to that in Lightroom Classic, and produces a good, seamless result. As in Classic, you get options for spherical, cylindrical, and perspective projection modes. You also have the option to Auto crop to remove non-rectangular edges. Boundary Warp slides stretches the image edges so you don’t have to crop as much.

Enhance Details and Super Resolution

Enhance Details, which also arrived in the February 2019 update, uses machine-learning support in Windows and macOS to clarify complex parts of an image. It’s a subtle effect, and, for many photos, it doesn’t do a whole lot—especially for parts of the photo that have a consistent texture. You access Enhance Details from the Photo menu (or from a right-click menu), and then you see a dialog with a detail view of your shot. Running it creates a new DNG file. There’s an estimate of how long the process will take, but in testing the tool took quite a bit longer to complete than the estimated 10 seconds—more like a full minute.

On some early tries it also caused the program to quit unexpectedly, and on a 50MB NEF file from a Nikon D850, I got an error message saying that the image couldn’t be loaded. As noted, the effect is subtle: if you zoom in a lot, you see some pixel differences. I thought that when looking at the whole image at 1:1 magnification, there was an impression of greater sharpness, but several colleagues couldn’t see any difference. On some shots, the difference wasn’t noticeable at all, and on some, it was only noticeable at 2:1 magnification. It might make a meaningful difference in a large print, however.

The shot below has Detail Enhance enabled on the right. Still, I’m not convinced that it has 30 percent more detail. PCMag’s camera guru, Jim Fisher tried the feature in the macOS version on his 5K iMac and found similarly minimal results.

A related feature is Super Resolution, which is meant for improving old, low-megapixel images. You simply choose Photo > Enhance, and check the Super Resolution box. Unlike the Enhance Details tool described above, Super Resolution works on JPGs; it also produces results in DNG format, however. I’m not a fan of the AI-generated results: It looks like paint strokes are applied to the image. That said, the tool does smooth out pixelation.

Sharing and Output

Sharing and output remain weaknesses for Lightroom. Most consumers who use Lightroom will likely want to share their photos to a few common places: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Flickr. They also may like to print their photos. Lightroom offers none of those options. The lack of printing capability is particularly flabbergasting, in that the app has been updated several times since its release.

Though you still can’t print directly from the program, you can send photos to Blurb for book printing and to WHCC (White House Custom Colour) for wall art. There’s still no way to get handheld photos printed, aside from exporting image and uploading them to a photo printing service or printing them yourself using your operating system’s printing features. Both of the built-in options throw you out to your web browser.

Output choices have increased, however. You can now save to DNG and TIFF formats as well as saving JPGs and original raw file with a sidecar XMP settings file. There are differing views on DNG, but it uses less storage and includes metadata and edits without requiring a sidecar file. Since Lightroom syncs everything to cloud storage, the only reason I can think of for exporting to DNG is for backing up and archiving.

You can also upload to Adobe Portfolio web galleries. Lightroom’s online galleries present the images well and allow sharing via a link. They also allow multiple contributors, each of which can add their own photos to your albums. The online galleries let you permit or disallow downloading, EXIF viewing, and location viewing.

Unlike in Lightroom Classic, there’s no right-click option here to email the current photo, and no output plugins that support the likes of Flickr and SmugMug online gallery syncing. If Adobe had decided to make a modern UWP Windows Store app, you’d be able to share to mail contacts, Dropbox, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Twitter, Messenger, OneDrive, and any other photo-accepting app installed on your PC. In fact, the free Photos app that comes with Windows lets you share to any of those.

You can’t convert your pictures to many different file types, as you can in Corel PaintShop Pro. So, if you need a PNG or GIF, look elsewhere. Ditto for soft proofing. At least you can now rename the file at export. You can, however, specify a pixel measurement for the longer side of the image.

The watermarking feature that arrived in the June 2020 update lets you choose a font, style, rotation, color, and even drop shadow. It’s a welcome addition for those who like to publicize their brand.

Collaborative Editing

Another Share option is to Invite a contact to edit your photo. From the Share menu you choose Invite People, where you can specify whether you want the invited person to be able to view, contribute, or contribute and edit the photos in an album.

A final sharing option is Share Edit. This submits your photo along with all your adjustments to Adobe for inclusion on the Discover tab. There, you can also follow contributors, save their edits as presets to use on your own photos, and tap a heart icon to show your admiration.

Mobile App and Website

As a mobile app, Lightroom is actually more impressive than its desktop counterpart. In fact, it even boasts the People and Profiles features, along with a slider control for the Upright, Guided Upright, and Geometry tools.

All the same photos you see synced in the desktop app also appear in the mobile app, and you even get the gradient and brush selective editing. The latest version lets you pick a specific color to use with the brush and gradient tools—particularly useful for skies. It also includes chromatic aberration correction and effective noise reduction.

You can set the app to automatically upload anything shot on the phone to your Lightroom cloud storage, and you can search, filter, and tag your photos. In addition to all those post-shot options, you can use the in-app camera, which boasts exposure compensation with a simple swipe and a White Balance tool. It also has an HDR feature, and best of all, saves the result as a raw file. In all, it’s a great mobile photo app. It’s available as both an Android app and an iOS app, and both work identically. I tested on an Apple iPhone X. iPhone users, in particular, will find the app’s raw file saving important, since recent Android OSes can save raw camera files without third-party apps.

Lightroom’s web galleries bear a strong resemblance to the newer Lightroom application. In fact, the left organization panel shows the same list of albums, but its Add Photos option is in a different place, above the photo collection. You can also create new albums in the web interface. If you share a photo, you can choose a layout and get a single URL to share an album publicly. A dashboard shows you your recent albums, imports by month, and stats, such as how many photos, albums, and videos you’ve added.

You also get online editing, including the Light, Color, and Effects tools. You don’t, however, get the Detail, Optics, or Geometry corrections. There are a couple of Technology Previews you can opt into, such as Auto Tone and Best Photos, which uses AI to detect your photos with the best lighting and composition. Other differences between the installed and web versions include controls on the latter not working well with touch, the very slow loading of editing tools, and a lack of before-and-after viewing.

What’s Missing From This Version of Lightroom?

Though its capabilities have been growing with updates, this version of Lightroom is still missing some key functionality found in the Classic product. I’ve already mentioned the inability to control what’s synced, the lack of local printing, robust file conversion, color label organization, and sharing options. But there’s more: There’s no plug-in support and no tethered shooting capability. You can’t view EXIF or IPTC data, and there are no slideshow creation, photobook layout, or geo-tagged map view.

There are some things missing that you even find in the consumer competition from Apple and Microsoft as well as in Lightroom Classic, including basic video editing (though it lets you import and play video) and automatic gallery creation. All those products also have some printing capability.

Lightroom Lite

With Lightroom, Adobe is going after people looking to up their game from Apple Photos, Google Photos, and Windows’ included Microsoft Photos, rather than pro photographers. Serious amateurs may dig the slick modeless workflow, so these enthusiasts will want to kick its tires. Adobe is also gradually adding features, and Lightroom is certainly more powerful than the free platform-included photo editors. Pros will miss the broader Lightroom Classic capabilities, however, and getting consumers to pay $120 per year for it seems like a hard sell.

Pro photographers should stick with Lightroom Classic, our Editors’ Choice for photo workflow software. Enthusiasts are better served by Adobe Photoshop Elements, also an Editors’ Choice, or the excellent CyberLink PhotoDirector. For total detailed image manipulation without the workflow features, our Editors’ Choice is Adobe Photoshop.