Giant software company that dominates the creative software industry. Adobe publishes not just Photoshop and Lightroom, but Premiere Pro and After Effects video editing software, InDesign page layout and Illustrator vector drawing software and a whole lot more as part of its Creative Cloud ecosystem.
If you are in the creative industry as marketeer or a content provider or an advertising agency or a publisher, you will probably eventually unravel what Adobe is offering at Adobe Max 2025 and work out what will be useful to you and what will not. Good luck.
Adobe Lightroom (2025) verdict: 4.1 stars Adobe Lightroom does something pretty amazing. It makes all your photos available to organize and edit anywhere, on any device. But this does come at a cost. One drawback is that you have to pay for Adobe’s Creative Cloud storage, which is now included in its subscription plans. Another is that this version of Lightroom is slicker and more streamlined than the original Lightroom Classic, but also sacrifices some organizational features.
It’s a fake. Good, isn’t it? The reason I know it’s a fake is because I made it myself using Adobe Firefly Generative AI. In fact the only creative input involved was how I worded my text prompt. The trouble is, when AI generated images get this good, how can we tell what’s real any more?
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?
Verdict: 4.5 stars Lightroom Classic is the traditional, desktop-based version of Lightroom. Its editing tools are powerful and versatile, aided by new and steadily improving AI masking tools. Lightroom Classic continues to be the professional cataloguing and editing tool by which all others are judged, though it’s not always the best.
Lightroom vs Photoshop, which is best? It’s not that simple, as anyone who uses them will know, because although there is some crossover (well, a lot of crossover), they have very different roles and very different strengths and weaknesses. One is not better than the other because it depends on what you want to do….
Cataloguing software can organize your entire photo collection, but how does it work and what do you look for?