Adobe Lightroom CC
- Adobe Lightroom App Review App
- Adobe Lightroom Cc App Review
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- Adobe Lightroom Mobile App
Adobe Lightroom Review 2017: A Powerful RAW Workflow System. As part of the Adobe Creative Cloud software series, it has a wide range of integrations with other related image software, including the industry standard image editor, Photoshop. It also can output your retouched images in a range of formats from a Blurb photo book to an HTML-based slideshow. Adobe Lightroom 4 adds a book creation module, geo-tagging, soft proofing capability and significant changes to image editing tools. This review will show you what you need to know to get started in this latest version. Aug 02, 2019 The best RAW camera apps for Android and iOS; Adobe Lightroom is a powerful RAW processor with some advanced editing tools, but an equally important feature is its.
Editor Rating: Fair (2.5)
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Editors' Review. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a powerful and versatile program for editing and enhancing your photos, as well as compiling them into a slideshow. With an intuitive interface and plenty of built-in tips along the way, this program makes advanced editing features available to all experience levels. Adobe Lightroom Mobile Review. Adobe Lightroom Mobile is a response to Lightroom’s popularity increasing ten fold in recent years – not surprising given the amount of flexibility and control it offers to photographers looking for an advanced all-in-one software package to edit and process their images. Used by millions of photographers worldwide. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a free, powerful, yet intuitive camera app and photo editor. Lightroom empowers you to capture and edit beautiful images while helping you to become a better.
Pros
Simple, clear interface. 1TB cloud storage for syncing photo collection.Cons
Pricey compared with other online storage/syncing services. Limited sharing. Can't choose which photos to sync. No printing or file type conversion.Bottom Line
Lightroom is going after the consumer photo audience with this complete redesign of the pro photo workflow tool. It's slick and nimble, but pros will want more power, and amateurs may balk at the price.
Lightroom photo software has long been a favorite among professional photographers. There's now a choice between two flavors: Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC. The first (the subject of this review) is designed for consumers who want to access their photos online and use some powerful editing and organizing tools. Lightroom Classic retains Lightroom's traditional interface and toolset. Adobe has been gradually adding features to bring CC up towards parity with Classic; unfortunately, the new program still lacks some basic capabilities—printing, for example. Veteran users will likely want to stick with Lightroom Classic, at least for now.
Adobe recently updated both Lightroom applications (along with its Camera Raw utility) with an AI-based Enhance Details feature for raw camera files. All three apps also use the nifty Profiles feature to determine how to convert raw camera files into viewable images, which determines the starting point of your editing journey. Some creative Profiles that are very similar to Instagram filters join the Raw Profiles, and those can be used on JPGs as well as raw images. The same February 2019 Lightroom update, aka Version 2.2, also added panorama and HDR merging capabilities.
Pricing and Setup
You have at least three options when buying Lightroom. The Lightroom CC plan runs $9.99 per month and includes a 1TB of online storage, but with that plan you don't get Photoshop CC. The Photography plan, also $9.99 per month, gets you both Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC, along with 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 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).
SEE ALSO: Adobe Lightroom Classic
At about $120 per year, Lightroom is more expensive in the long run than competing photo software such as ACDSee Ultimate ($99), DxO PhotoLab ($129-$199), Capture One ($299), CyberLink PhotoDirector ($50), PaintShop Pro ($79), and AfterShot Pro ($65). Keep in mind, too, that those are one-shot prices: Pay once and you own the software forever.
In terms of cloud storage, Lightroom CC is also pricey compared with other services. A terabyte of OneDrive storage costs about half a Lightroom CC subscription, at $69.99 per year, and that includes photo syncing, along with all the Office apps. For the same $9.99 per month as Lightroom, Apple's iCloud gives you 2TB—twice as much as Adobe. Google also charges $9.99 for 2TB, but if you don't mind saving compressed versions of your photos, you can upload everything for free. If you just want photo software without the cloud storage and syncing, you can get Adobe Photoshop Elements for $99, or Corel PaintShop Pro for $79.99—both as one-time purchases.
Creative Cloud subscribers with the eponymous utility installed now see two Lightroom choices: Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC. Installing is a simple matter of tapping Install in the Creative Cloud utility. As of October 2018, an auto-app-update setting saves you even that effort. Previously, updates were only possible on-demand. The Lightroom CC program takes up 1.3GB on my hard drive, half a gigabyte less than Lightroom Classic.
The Lightroom CC Interface
Lightroom CC 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. On first run, you see the Lightroom CC splash screen, and then the window starts filling with a tile view of all the photos on your system. You can switch that to a contact-sheet view and sort by import date, capture date, or modified date.
Lspci on windows 10. Lspci and setpci require Administrator privileges for certain operations - run them in an elevated command prompt on Windows Vista and newer Source code Old versions.
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: Organizing and adjustment tools are hidden behind box and control slider icons, at the left and right edges, respectively. I find it a little annoying, however, that you can't display the organization panel and adjustment panel at the same time: When you open one, the other closes. Thankfully, you can change this behavior in Preferences by switching the panels from Automatic to Manual.
Double-clicking on a thumbnail in the tile view opens a photo in full view, and double-tapping again takes you back to gallery view. 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 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 you don't get a zoom slider showing you the percent, as you do in CyberLink PhotoDirector.
As for touch input, Lightroom CC 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 features a full touch mode for tablets and touch-screen PCs such as the Surface Book.
Importing Images
Neither Lightroom CC 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 CC 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 and immediately 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.
The import process has long been one of the pain points of Lightroom: Many have complained about how slow it is on photo forums and blogs. 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 want it to happen fast. To be fair, importing is now faster in Lightroom CC (and even in the recently updated Classic).
I tested import performance with 235 7MB images from a FujiFilm X-A3 camera. Lightroom CC took 2:52 (minutes:seconds) for the import, and Lightroom Classic took 4:12, though that included converting some images to DNG. Building previews took Classic yet another 46 seconds, though I could start editing before that step completed. In any case, Lightroom CC is faster at importing.
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 reflect more 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 new Profiles in Lightroom CC 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 new 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 new 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 found 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, 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 feels, usually without being too obvious. In some cases they're a one-step improvement. It's also impressive how different the 17 B&W choices are.
Organizing Photos
The search bar in Lightroom CC 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 do 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, so 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 CC 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.
People Recognition
The People view uses AI in the cloud (dubbed Sensei) to automatically detect faces in your photos. These show up as 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, and lighting.
Lightroom CC does a good job at identifying and grouping people; I was impressed how it asked, correctly, if it should merge a 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 pre-CC versions of Lightroom. So people tagged in those won't appear in CC's People feature, even if the photos are synced to Adobe's cloud.
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 CC 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 CC. 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.
You can no longer use the mouse wheel to increase and decrease the slider positions, which is something I liked to do, 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 … menu; I'd rather have it always accessible.
As with nearly all photo apps these days, Lightroom CC lets you apply filter effects, via the Presets button at the bottom of the window. You get a good selection of color, black and white, grain, and vignette preset adjustments, and you can see the effects applied to your as you hover the mouse cursor over each. But Photoshop Elements offers more options with its filters.
Cropping is well implemented, with a good choice of preset aspect ratios, and there's even an Auto-leveling option.
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.
Thankfully, you do still get noise reduction in CC, and it works well, as does the automatic chromatic aberration correction. Those are a couple of tools you don't get with the free consumer apps. But if you want superpowered noise reduction, check out DxO PhotoLab. Another more advanced tool that you get in CC but not in free photo apps is its Geometry distortion correction based on lens profiles.
Panorama and HDR Merge
New for the February 2019 update of Lightroom CC are photo merging capabilities. These include Panorama, HDR, and HDR Panorama. The HDR Merge tool offers just three options: check boxes 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 nonrectangular edges. The Boundary Warp slides stretches the image edges so you don't have to crop as much.
Enhance Details
A new tool for raw camera files in Lightroom CC is Enhance Details, which arrived in the February 2019 update. The feature 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 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.
Left: Without Enhance Details; Right: Enhance Details used.Sharing and Output
Sharing and output remain weaknesses for Lightroom CC. Most consumers who use Lightroom CC 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 this is the fourth major version of the app. And for some reason, a prime sharing target that previously shipped with Lightroom CC was removed: The initial version included Facebook, possibly the most-frequently used photo sharing target on the planet.
Even after the Version 2.2 update, the only output choices are to save as JPG to local storage, or to upload to Adobe's web galleries. At least the latter presents the images well and allows sharing via a link. It also lets you allow or disallow downloading, EXIF viewing, and location viewing on the part of the person you send the share link to. Adobe has fixed a serious and repeatable bug I encountered: The uploaded photo was the original rather than the edited version. I asked Adobe about this, and the company has since issued an update fix.
Unlike in Lightroom Classic, there's no right-click option to email the current photo. 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, 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.
I have tried to run it as Admin, from the system32 folder, transfered another copy from my Win7 test box, and nothing works. I can't get cmd.exe to run in my Windows 7 x86 RTM box at all. I uninstalled my AV and tried in safe mode just to make sure it wasn't that, and it still didn't work. Exe programs not opening. When I try to run it and nothing happens I would check the Task Manager and it could see all of the instances running.
The only other output option is to save the file to disk, and you can only save as JPG or the original file type plus an XMP metadata file—you can't convert to a file type of your choice, as you can in Corel PaintShop Pro. So, if you need a TIFF, or even a PNG, look elsewhere. Ditto for watermarking and soft proofing. You can't even rename the file at export.
Mobile App and Website
As a mobile app, Lightroom CC 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 for both Android and iOS, which 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, annoyingly not found at lightroom.com but rather at lightroom.adobe.com, bear a strong resemblance to the newer Lightroom CC 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 like 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 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 Lightroom CC?
Lightroom CC is still missing some key functionality. I've already mentioned the inability to control what's synced, the lack of printing, 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 web output options. There are some things missing that you even find in the consumer competition from Apple and Microsoft, including basic video editing (though it lets you import and play video), and automatic gallery creation. Not to mention, even those products have print capability.
Lightroom Lite
With Lightroom CC, Adobe is going after the Apple Photos/Google Photos/Microsoft Photos audience. Sure, some serious amateur photographers may dig the slick modeless workflow, and very enthusiastic enthusiasts will want to kick its tires. Adobe is also gradually adding back features. We suspect many will miss the deeper Lightroom capabilities, and it seems unlikely that consumers will want to pay $120 per year for what they can get much of free or inexpensively from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. 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 CyberLink PhotoDirector. Consumers get a much better deal with Apple Photos, Google Photos, or Windows 10's included Photos app.
Adobe Lightroom CC
Bottom Line: Adobe targets the consumer and enthusiast photography audience with this lightweight version of its Lightroom professional photo workflow program. It's slick and nimble, but pros will want more capabilities and amateurs may balk at the price.
Adobe Lightroom Mobile is a response to Lightroom’s popularity increasing ten fold in recent years – not surprising given the amount of flexibility and control it offers to photographers looking for an advanced all-in-one software package to edit and process their images.
Used by millions of photographers worldwide, Lightroom is in essence a streamlined version of Photoshop, with all the sophisticated tools needed to categorize, rate, edit and export photographs from an intuitive user interface.
Something Lightroom hasn’t offered before is the ability to synchronise a desktop Lightroom library with a mobile device. The workaround for those wanting to use Lightroom on the move has been to use a laptop, but this isn’t always a practical or viable option when you consider they can be bulky items to transport, not to mention the necessity of mains power to charge the battery, which isn’t always available.
Adobe’s answer has been to create Lightroom Mobile – a free app developed on the success of the Lighroom interface that’s designed to let Creative Cloud users organise and edit their images easily on the move, with all adjustments made syncing up nicely with the users desktop Lightroom library via the cloud.
How it works
To take advantage of Lightroom Mobile, users must ensure they’re running the latest version of Lightroom 5 (v5.4) prior to installing the Lightroom Mobile app on an iPad. (Android and iPhone versions are currently in development).
After linking Lightroom 5 and Lightroom Mobile to a Creative Cloud account, the two automatically join forces and sync any images that are grouped and enabled for sync under Lightroom’s Collection tab.
To prevent enormous and unnecessary volumes of image data being synced to the iPad, Lightroom Mobile doesn’t sync the entire image catalog, nor does it duplicate images listed under the Folders tab within the Library module.
To prevent large files clogging up an iPad too quickly, all images are automatically resized at the syncronisation stage to around 0.9MB, creating what’s known as a Smart Preview. These previews may only be a fraction of the size of the original image, but they’re optimised so that they display excellent resolution, with the facility to pinch and zoom to a high magnification to inspect detail and sharpness.
Slideshow preview
After the syncronisation between Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile is complete – a process that took 7mins 54seconds for 150 images over an average broadband connection – a square thumbnail of the first image in the collection is revealed in the app.
From the bottom left of this thumbnail a slideshow can be created, or by tapping the bottom right, various Collection options are loaded from which there’s the opportunity to Enable Offline Editing. Selecting this downloads the Smart Preview of each image in the Collection to the iPad.
This is essential if you’d like to work on images on the move but don’t happen to be within range of a Wi-fi hotspot to load images from the cloud. The only thing to watch out for here is that smart previews take up storage space on the iPad (55.7MB for our 150 images) and also require some pre-thought to ensure you have them downloaded and ready to use before you find yourself in an area without Wi-fi – rather like you’d download a film on an iPad before watching it on a plane.
The app provides an option to select Sync Only Over Wi-fi and this should be switched on if you frequently pair devices via personal hotspot and want to prevent rinsing your 3G/4G data allowance and incur serious expense.
When the iPad is reconnected to Wi-fi, it automatically updates the adjustments that have been made in Lightroom mobile to the cloud and then to the original desktop Lightroom library – a process that can take a little time depending on your Wi-fi connection speed.
Interface and Tools
As to be expected, Lightroom mobile has a clean and uncluttered design just like the desktop version.
Loading the app instantly reveals the collections that have been synced and opening a collection presents all the images in a clear and easy-to-view gallery with portrait orientated images neatly slotting in alongside landscape ones.
Tapping an image loads the editing area from which adjustments are made and it’s been made intuitive to use in the way it allows you to rotate the iPad to view the smart preview at a large size whether the image was shot in the landscape or portrait format. Exif data and a histogram are overlaid at the top, but tapping the image hides these.
There are a number of finger gesture shortcuts to get familiar with too, one of which involves sliding three fingers up the tablet to view the difference between the original image and after adjustments have been made.
Beneath the main image preview there’s the option to pick, unflag or reject an image, however there’s no option to five-star rate an image or apply any keywords – something we expect in a future update as Adobe develop the app further. Directly below the preview are four icons.
The furthest on the left loads a filmstrip to help navigate the collection quickly, whereas the next icon along provides all the adjustment settings you’d expect to see in Lightroom’s basic tab such as exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows and clarity.
Precise adjustment of these frequently used settings is made via a slider scale above and with the iPad’s touchscreen being as responsive as it is, it makes for a very intuitive image adjustment experience. There’s an undo icon if you’d like to take steps back in your workflow and a reset option is also to hand if you’d like to return the image to its original state.
Adobe Lightroom App Review App
Other adjustment control includes the option to apply up to 47 filter presets, but those wanting to create their own or apply custom-made presets will be disappointed to find that this hasn’t made its way into the mobile version.
Selecting the crop icon loads seven ready-made aspect crops to choose from, with crops being made non-destructively to return the image back to its original dimensions if and when required.
The convenience of being able to make basic image adjustments on the move in Lightroom mobile is great, however at present it is rather limited in the way it doesn’t provide all the advanced features you might expect.
Adobe Lightroom Cc App Review
As well as lacking the very useful Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush to make localised adjustments, the mobile version doesn’t currently support lens corrections or the Spot Healing Brush.
Those hoping Lightroom mobile would offer all the functionality that Lightroom boasts will be slightly disappointed to find that it doesn’t at this current stage, but we’re hopeful that as the app is developed there will be a closer crossover between the two.
Verdict
Lightroom Mobile is a slick app to use and from the moment I started using I appreciated how stable an editing platform it is for cloud savvy photographers who’d like to work on the go and speed up their workflow.
No hiccups were experienced in terms of performance or operation, however it did take a bit of time getting into the routine of creating a collection for the images we wanted to sync with the iPad before waiting for them to appear on the app.
Adobe Lightroom App Review For Mac
The way the interface has been designed to work as intuitively as Lightroom itself makes it a breeze to navigate and anyone coming from Lightroom to Lightroom Mobile will be able to pick it up very easily.
For photographers with an iPad who’d like to flag up images based on how good they are, or make basic adjustments to images while they’re on a flight, long journey, or in a remote area with no Wi-fi, it’s an app worth downloading.
The area where it needs to improve however is in the advanced tools and functionality it offers. There were numerous occasions where we wanted to apply a post-crop vignette, use the localised adjustment tools and apply lens corrections.
If Lightroom mobile is to offer the same level of functionality and customisation as Lightroom itself, there’s a lot of work to be done behind the scenes, but Adobe should be applauded for creating such an intuitive cloud-based mobile editing app for the iPad.
It’s an excellent starting point from which to develop it further for the more advanced photographer and Lightroom user.
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Adobe Lightroom Mobile App
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