Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom is photo management and editing software for photographers, covering desktop, mobile, web and Lightroom Classic on one subscription.

Adobe Lightroom is photo management and editing software built around a photographer's whole library rather than one open file. Adobe makes it and sells it under the Lightroom name on its own site. The application runs on desktop computers, on phones and tablets, and in a web browser, and the same subscription includes Lightroom Classic, the separate desktop edition. Buying Lightroom therefore means buying both editions rather than choosing between them. The library is the centre of the product. Photographs are searched by what appears in them: Adobe Sensei, the company's machine learning service, indexes the content of a picture, so a search can return frames that nobody labelled by hand. Editing sits beside the library rather than in a separate application. Subject and sky masking marks out a person or a sky in a single step, which is how a face or a background gets treated on its own. Noise reduction runs a machine learning model over images shot at high ISO. It is aimed at wedding, event, travel and landscape photographers, and at in-house photo teams at publishers, retailers and agencies. Photographers who want Photoshop as well take the Photography plan, which carries both applications on one bill. Students and teachers have a tier of their own. Adobe prices the individual plans per person and the team plans per licence. Lightroom is used where pictures arrive faster than they can be filed: a client archive that has to be searchable years later, a stock collection, a picture desk, a personal record built over a decade. The day to day work is finding a frame by what it contains, masking a subject or a sky in a single step, and taking the noise out of a picture shot at high ISO. Studios with several photographers on one archive take the team plans and hold a licence for each seat. Lightroom Classic is the edition photographers keep for a machine-based arrangement, and it arrives with the subscription rather than as a second purchase.