1. Introduction to Lightroom, Strengths and Weaknesses

Light Room is not the first photo editing software ever made. The first industry standard for photo editing was Photoshop, first written in 1987, and distributed in 1988. Photoshop was the first software to take the basic tools of a real photography dark room and digitize them. Light Room was created many years later in 2007, as a way to improve and streamline the editing and file management processes for photographers, whereas Photoshop, ironically, became more and more of a digital painter’s tool.

Lightroom has several advantages over Photoshop. The most important is you can’t damage the image (losing information) as you edit your photos. When you edit in Photoshop, there are several ways you can accidentally cut out details, and if you save it that way, there’s no way to undo the damage. Photoshop also works better with jpeg images, and every time you save a jpeg, it compresses the image, further reducing detail.

In Light Room, it remembers exactly how the image was at the beginning as well as every change you make, saving all the stages, and you can always go back to or undo any of those stages at any time. You can right click on an image and select “make a virtual copy”. It doesn’t take any extra space in your hard drive. The file name will be copy 1. You can do anything to it. Turn it black and white, crop it, add or remove noise, do anything to it. This is true for every kind of image file. You can make hundreds of edits to an image and never hurt the original file. And, you don’t have to keep renaming the file in different stages, taking up more and more of your hard drive space.

Photo editing is also faster in Light Room. According to Chris Parker, what used to take a week to edit, now only takes a few hours. This is because Light Room uses AI to go ahead and edit many images at once, based on what you did to one similar image. And if the AI isn’t perfect, that doesn’t matter, because, again, you can always go back to the original state and/or tweak it how you like.

Another time saving tool are the hash tags you can add to your images and then search for them in Light Room. You can also sync Light Room to the Cloud. You upload your pics to the Cloud and you can edit them on any computer/iPad and it’ll save changes on the Cloud to all your devices at once. Some photographers have editors on hand to quickly edit and send pics to ESPN and other places while they’re shooting on location.

Light Room Flaws & Their Solutions:

1. Upscaling.

Let’s say you want to digitally increase the resolution of your image – especially important if you’ve cropped a small part of it. Light Room doesn’t do this. You can do it in Photoshop, or better yet, Adobe Camera Raw and you can double the size, and it’s a better quality than what Photoshop can do.

2. De-Noise Option is Outdated

So, Light Room hasn’t updated their De-Noise functions in a long time. It’s okay for lower ISO’s, but for 800 and higher, it’s not great. If you use Luminance too far, you lose all the image detail, it gets smoothed out. Chris Parker recommends using the TOPAZ plugin.

Lightroom vs. Lightroom Classic

Answer coming soon...

The Cost of Light Room and Free Alternatives

Light Room Classic costs $10 a month or $120 a year. The student price is currently $20 a month for the full Adobe cloud. In February 2019 Adobe stopped supporting Light Room 6 – the last copy you could buy outright. You may be able to find versions of Light Room 6 on Amazon or Ebay.

You can buy Capture 1 outright or subscribe to it, and Darktable is phenomenal freeware. Darktable is slower to fix errors or enhance features than Adobe because Adobe hires 500 people to push through these things. Darktable doesn’t have those kinds of resources. Another option is Luminar Neo which uses powerful AI editing software, and you can simply buy once.