It’s Adobe’s answer to an organizational demand from our ever-increasing photo supply.Ĭurious users can give it a shot using a 7 day free trial. Storage is so cheap and plentiful that it’s a mindless task to take hundreds of photos that have a tendency to sit on our phones or up in the cloud begging to be organized. Now with the advent of cloud storage and huge solid state memory drives we find ourselves at an interesting crossroads of efficiency: as something becomes more efficient we tend to use more of it. You could only fill up that SD card with a couple hundred hi-res shots before another trip to the electronics store for a second. When digital cameras and smartphones first came on the scene, you had to be cognizant of the photos you took because of storage limitations.

Still, Lightroom plays well at its specific role in the Adobe suite of products and should appeal to any photography buff wanting to wrangle their ever-growing collection.Īdobe’s free trial makes it a simple task try out the light touches and photo management features of their Lightroom appĮasy and effective tool to handle any photographer’s organizational needs using Adobe’s cloud. Tutorials could use an improvement by being integrated into the program itself as they currently they exist in video format only. Lightroom photos can sync up and share directly to your Adobe Portfolio where you can build a photography website in minutes. The UI is icon heavy and easy to grasp, the tiling of photos makes it much simpler to work on multiple images at a time, and the toolset doesn’t overwhelm the average user like Photoshop can. It does so with ease and Lightroom always retains the original photo. You can’t do invasive surgery on photos with Lightroom like you can Photoshop, but it’s meant to serve a much different purpose at a higher altitude. Lightroom is like the workshop for your photography hobby: spread your photos out on the table, organize them into albums, apply star ratings for favorites or flag them for acceptance/rejection, and apply light touches and corrections at scale.

A relative newcomer to the Adobe suite of products, Lightroom focuses on the breadth part of the photo manipulation equation where the venerable Photoshop has eyes on depth. Whether you’re a wedding photographer or an Instagram power user, anyone that cares to manage and brush up hundreds of photos ought to give Adobe Lightroom a whirl.