Counterpoint: Give Adobe’s Lightroom Classic CC changes a chance, because it’s way faster

 

 

There is quite a bit of confusion and anger regarding Adobe’s updates to Lightroom today, and I did my best to cover those in an editorial you can read here. The point of that editorial was to put into words the range of negative emotions that many photographers are feeling with regards to what was once their favorite photo editing program.

But it’s not all bad. Really. There is stuff that should give you hope. If you’re willing to stick with Adobe. Though we have not completed a full review of the platform, testing has shown that the Develop module is much improved over the previous iteration of Lightroom. Though exporting may not be much faster, the entire process of using Lightroom from import through Develop feels… quick.

 

The Develop Module is much improved in speed and stability.

Using sliders, zooming into areas of the image, and making mass edits are very fast. What used to be a tedious process now feels much cleaner and far more streamlined. Though the actual system doesn’t look different, it sure feels good.

For those who already work inside of Adobe’s cloud system, this is a huge boon. Speed and agility in Lightroom has been absolutely terrible for years now, and despite promises over that time to fix those issues, things have stayed largely the same.

This is the first time that I can confidently say Adobe made positive changes to the Lightroom Classic application.

Now there are still issues with naming convention, the addition of a new Lightroom (Lightroom CC which honestly should have just been called Lightroom Elements to prevent confusion), and the announcement that perpetual software and updates to that software would stop at the end of the year, but those are a separate issue you can read about here.

If you woke up this morning to a lot of chatter about Lightroom and just want to know what that means for you today…

TL;DR: Lightroom Classic CC - the classic Lightroom experience you can upgrade from the CC desktop app - is much better. There is still room for improvement on the new Lightroom CC (which is like Lightroom Elements) and the discontinuation of perpetual software is a bummer.