From the course: Lightroom and Photoshop: Black and White Photography

Which Lightroom is best for you?

From the course: Lightroom and Photoshop: Black and White Photography

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Which Lightroom is best for you?

- When we talk about Lightroom, we're really talking about two Lightrooms. We're talking about Lightroom Classic, which came out in 2007, and Lightroom CC, or Lightroom, as a I call it, which came out in 2017. So I want to explain how we got here and which one might be the right Lightroom for you. And, it's totally okay if it's both, and it's absolutely fine if you're not quite sure which, because it's pretty easy to move back and forth between the two. But, at a certain point, you do want to commit to one or the other. All right, so let's go way back and understand that Photoshop was originally the solution for photographers and digital photographers. And, in the early days, you would scan an image, or maybe a photo CD, to really date the workflow. You'd come into Photoshop, you'd work on one image at a time. But with the mass proliferation of digital cameras, it was obvious that Photoshop was not the best solution. And so, Lightroom Classic was born in 2007. And, it really looked at your whole workflow. Library of images, task-based tools, gave us a focused and subtractive workflow, but that really said, you know, photographers are working with a lot more than one image. And, that's the application many of us have known and loved for many, many, many years, and we'll certainly talk a lot about Lightroom Classic. A couple of years ago, in 2017, Adobe acknowledged again that the world of photography has changed. And I think we've all experienced this change, which is that we all have cameras in our pockets, pretty powerful cameras. And our relationship with photography doesn't just happen at the desk, it happens everywhere. And so we should be able to capture images everywhere, we should be able to access our images everywhere, and we should be able to edit those images. without any compromise, wherever we are. And that's the main distinction between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom. So, let's talk about where the benefits are for various users. Lightroom Classic is a fantastic solution if you're already entrenched in that work flow. If you've been using Lightroom Classic and you love it, great, by all means keep using it. It's never been faster, it's never been more performant, it's never been more powerful, and sounds like you're doing great, keep using it. If you have a workflow that exists in a studio, alongside Photoshop, with printers, with a lot of hard drives, if you have hundreds of thousands of images, Lightroom Classic is probably the best solution. Because it does a great job with local files, and that's the distinction. Classic has your files on one system. One desktop, one laptop, one system at work. Wherever it might be, that's where the truth is. Where Lightroom, the more modern version of Lightroom, puts the truth in the cloud. And what that allows you to do is access your full-resolution files across devices. IOS, Android, tablet, phone, Mac, Windows, even the web. Even Apple TV, you can even preview your images on Apple TV. Now, with that, not only do you have access to your full-resolution files, because today's mobile devices are so powerful, you haven't compromised your editing, either. You can do the sort of things on a phone or a tablet that, only a few years ago, you'd have to do on the desktop. So you're not missing any power. Now the last part to the modern Lightroom workflow, is that because your images are in the cloud, they can be analyzed, and Adobe Sensei, which is this very powerful tool, can look at those images, and you can search simply by the content. If I want to see images of a green truck, I just type in green truck, and Lightroom is doing all of the work for me. It's undeniably a more advanced system, and a more modern system, but hopefully that explanation helps you understand which one might be best for you But, fear not, there's near feature parity between the two, so everything I describe in this course will apply to both versions, Lightroom Classic and Lightroom.

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