Adobe announces Lightroom CC: A streamlined cloud-based experience across desktop, web & mobile
posted Wednesday, October 18, 2017 at 8:00 AM EST
A big change is coming to Adobe Lightroom. Adobe has announced three major new products: Adobe Lightroom CC, Adobe Lightroom Classic CC and Adobe Photoshop CC. To learn about Lightroom Classic CC, click here. For more on Adobe Photoshop CC, click here. This article is all about the new Lightroom CC product and experience.
Adobe Lightroom CC highlights
The photography industry is changing and how people edit their photos in the advent of advanced mobile photography has changed too. "In an increasingly mobile-centric world, and with major improvements in smartphone cameras, Lightroom is transforming digital photography again" with Lightroom CC. "Cloud-based" is the primary focus of Lightroom CC and the software has been built from the ground up to be accessible and to handle editing, organizing, storing and sharing photos from any connected device.
In addition to connectedness, approachability is another primary focus of Lightroom CC. Users of Lightroom for Mobile will recognize the user interface of the new Lightroom CC for desktop. It is streamlined and laid out much like Lightroom for Mobile. It also eschews Lightroom Classic's modules. Alongside the new look, there are also new searching tools, including searchable keywords, which can be automatically applied thanks to Adobe Sensei implementation.
Being able to edit anywhere is possible with Lightroom CC, including editing of full-resolution photos on mobile devices, desktop and the web. Any edits you make are automatically synchronized across all connected devices and can be automatically backed up to cloud storage (multiple storage options are available, more on this later), including RAW file backup.
Sharing is important to many photographers and Lightroom CC allows for easy sharing of your files via social media and also allows for custom web galleries, which can be quickly shared via a unique link. If you use Adobe Portfolio, there is new native integration between Portfolio and Adobe Lightroom CC as well.
It should be obvious by now that mobile and web integration is a large part of Lightroom CC and that comes with updated mobile and web experiences. On iOS, Adobe Lightroom CC for mobile includes iOS 11 File support, Adobe Sensei search, keyword functionality, enhanced album support and on iPad and an improved layout. The editing sliders between the desktop version of Lightroom CC and Lightroom CC for mobile are essentially the same. On Android, there is now tablet support for local adjustment brushes in addition to the improvements made to the iOS version. The web version of Lightroom CC has a public gallery page and the Portfolio integration we have already mentioned.
Pricing and release information
Lightroom CC is available across three photography plans. For photographers who want Lightroom CC plus Photoshop, there is a Creative Cloud Photography Plan with 1TB of cloud storage, which includes Lightroom CC in all its iterations, Photoshop CC, Adobe Spark, Adobe Portfolio and a terabyte of cloud storage. This plan costs $19.99 a month or $14.99 a month for a year if you are an existing Creative Cloud Photography customer.
If you need less storage, Lightroom CC has been added to the existing Creative Cloud Photography Plan which includes 20 gigabytes of storage. This plan remains priced at $9.99 a month.
Want storage but not Photoshop? There's a plan for that too. You can get Lightroom CC across desktop, web and mobile plus Adobe Spark and Portfolio with 1TB of cloud storage for $9.99 a month.
If you are exclusively a mobile photographer and don't need the Lightroom CC desktop experience, there is a $4.99 per month plan with 100GB of storage and access to only Lightroom Mobile for iOS and Android.