From the course: Migrating from Lightroom Classic CC

What is Lightroom CC?

From the course: Migrating from Lightroom Classic CC

Start my 1-month free trial

What is Lightroom CC?

“

- [Instructor] So, what exactly is Lightroom CC? Well, the short answer is it's Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Creative Cloud. And if you asked me that question a little while ago, I would've given you a completely different answer. You see, the Creative Cloud service is Adobe's subscription model service and you were able to get Lightroom as part of the photographers plan, which included Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. There were some cloud components with easy syncing allowing you to use mobile apps as well as share images with clients online. But it was primarily a folder-based and hard drive-based solution. Lightroom CC, the new product, is a completely different tool. Now, under the hood, there's a lot of similarities. It is using the same Adobe Raw engine for developing photos. As such, most of the same adjustments you're used to in traditional Lightroom are in Lightroom CC. Now, the previous version of the tool was renamed Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC. And that's quite a mouthful. But it is the tool that you've used and we'll talk more about that in a moment. But the new version of Lightroom, Lightroom Creative Cloud, is really designed to be a tool for mobile workflows. Now, it doesn't have to be mobile, there's certainly a desktop component, but the use of your tablet or smartphone as well as even a web browser from a machine anywhere means that your photo library is at your fingertips. If you've got a collection that's stored online, well you can have local smart previews cache to your device. You can use a tablet or a web browser on really any machine and even do basic edits. The redesigned interface is very modern, but longtime Lightroom users may notice that some things are missing. Maybe you were dependent on things like third-party plug-ins; those don't work. Maybe you need to export advanced formats like TIFF or Photoshop documents; you can't. Now, that doesn't mean that you won't eventually be able to do this. But it is clear, at least to me, that this new version of Lightroom needed to be released. Adobe wanted to get it out there and get feedback and start the wheels turning on this new workflow. However, there are parts that are not yet there. Now, Adobe is advertising the new Lightroom CC as being for modern photographers. You could read into that what you want. But it really means a workflow where you don't have to think about organizing your assets. Things are automatically sorted and sifted. Machine learning goes through and finds and tags your images with keywords in the background. You can search for things like "find a statue" or "show me the ocean" and Lightroom will search through your entire photo library and find those things. Well, that's pretty cool, but if you are really the type of person who has organized hard drives, lots of them, like I do, well that might not be so great. But with change there's change. And sometimes it brings great things, and sometimes it brings things getting used to. Fortunately, what it means for now is that you can choose to go to the new Lightroom CC. But if you don't want to, you don't have to leave your tools yet. Let's talk about some of the reasons why you might continue to stay in Lightroom Classic.

Contents