The ‘web first’ version of Lightroom. It’s a streamlined version of the original Lightroom Classic software and stores your images online in ‘the cloud’ so that they are available to all your devices everywhere. The extra storage needed does bring extra subscription costs.
So yes, Lightroom does have a Tone Curve panel which kind of does the same thing as levels adjustments, but you have to drag the black point and white point control points manually for each image – there’s no auto option. And yes, you can use Lightroom’s Auto tone adjustments, but these adjust eight different sliders at once, which is equally annoying. It’s why I keep going back to Capture One.
Lightroom doesn’t have a ‘negative’ filter for turning negative images into positives, so how do you do it? I’ve been going through my old mono negatives, rephotographing them with a camera and a macro lens, and I wanted to figure out how to convert them without using an external tool – and here’s how it’s done! (And it should work in any other software with curves adjustments.)
In this article I want to explain the difference between what I’ll call ‘image browsers’ and ‘image cataloguers’. Image cataloguing tools like Adobe Lightroom import your photos into a database and offer very sophisticated, very adaptable organizing and search options. But they bring their own limitations and complications. What’s the alternative?
It sounds nigh-on impossible, but Lightroom’s new AI powered Remove option really can wipe away reflections in glass as if they had never existed. This is something which would be very, very difficult to achieve using regular editing tools. I’ve tried it out on a number of different images and been impressed by just how effective it is.
This post was written soon after the new Distraction tools were added to Lightroom, so some of the issues I talk about may have been solved by the time you read this. This post is for anyone struggling to get the early version working…
Lightroom’s Enhance feature used to create a new (larger) DNG file alongside the original RAW file, but now it doesn’t! That’s huge news for anyone who uses Adobe’s AI denoising tool regularly. Here’s how the new setup works.
So what?, you’re thinking. Why do we need another generic Adobe profile when we can choose one that matches the camera’s own rendition and picture styles, or choose one of Adobe’s many built in black and white, creative, modern or vintage profiles? Well let’s see…
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.
Editing processes are very selective, and different photographers will have different approaches. Even the same photographer can have different approaches at different times. Just as it’s not always easy to cull your images, it’s not always easy to decide on the best way to edit them.
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?