Without the shift to a subscription model, it would be unlikely to face even minimal competition. Adobe is a veteran of the software industry and they have produced a very polished and capable product. Photoshop Lightroom Classic continues to enjoy outstanding success with growing features and performance improvements. It offers a subset of features to the previous software of the same name which was then renamed Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic, now with the CC suffix to highlight it as part of the Creative Cloud family.

Creative Cloud grew and as Adobe continued pushing customers into using cloud services, a new software called Lightroom was created with online processing and storage. The switch to subscription received immediate backlash since the non-destructive nature of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom confined work to its database which becomes inaccessible when a subscription is ended. It continued selling as traditional software for years until Adobe decided to bring it into their highly successful Creative Cloud subscription system. Still, Photoshop was a widely known flagship product and so Adobe renamed Lightroom to Photoshop Lightroom. By covering functionality from both, without offering an extensive feature-set, Adobe made Lightroom extremely accessible with a completely different interface than their other products.Įven though Adobe Photoshop offers truly immense and unmatched functionality, a significant amount of those are never used by photographers yet the clutter the interface and slow down interaction which is why Lightroom started with features focused around the idea of developing digital images. Initially created by the launch of Lightroom, as it was originally named, this type of software combines Digital Asset Management and Image Processing features into a single integrated application designed to cover most needs of photographers.

Adobe Lightroom Classic is the gold standard of Digital Photography Workflow software.

Adobe lightroom classic cc 2021