Not all functions of Lightroom keep working.
If you’ve been paying attention to the sturm und drang around the Creative Cloud licensing model ( here, here, here, here), this is a mind-blower.įirst, the * part.
When the license expires, the program keeps on working.* This is a radical development. Let's talk about some of the reasons why you might continue to stay in Lightroom Classic.Buried in the recent Adobe Creative Cloud rollout was a revolutionary change to the way Lightroom licensing functions. But if you don't want to, you don't have to leave your tools yet. Fortunately, what it means for now is that you can choose to go to the new Lightroom CC. And sometimes it brings great things, and sometimes it brings things getting used to. 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. 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. Machine learning goes through and finds and tags your images with keywords in the background. Things are automatically sorted and sifted. But it really means a workflow where you don't have to think about organizing your assets.
Now, Adobe is advertising the new Lightroom CC as being for modern photographers. However, there are parts that are not yet there. Adobe wanted to get it out there and get feedback and start the wheels turning on this new workflow. But it is clear, at least to me, that this new version of Lightroom needed to be released. Now, that doesn't mean that you won't eventually be able to do this. Maybe you need to export advanced formats like TIFF or Photoshop documents you can't. Maybe you were dependent on things like third-party plug-ins those don't work. The redesigned interface is very modern, but longtime Lightroom users may notice that some things are missing. You can use a tablet or a web browser on really any machine and even do basic edits. If you've got a collection that's stored online, well you can have local smart previews cache to your device. 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. But the new version of Lightroom, Lightroom Creative Cloud, is really designed to be a tool for mobile workflows. But it is the tool that you've used and we'll talk more about that in a moment.
Now, the previous version of the tool was renamed Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC. As such, most of the same adjustments you're used to in traditional Lightroom are in Lightroom CC. It is using the same Adobe Raw engine for developing photos. Now, under the hood, there's a lot of similarities. Lightroom CC, the new product, is a completely different tool. But it was primarily a folder-based and hard drive-based solution. There were some cloud components with easy syncing allowing you to use mobile apps as well as share images with clients online. 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. And if you asked me that question a little while ago, I would've given you a completely different answer. So, what exactly is Lightroom CC? Well, the short answer is it's Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Creative Cloud.