Lightroom CC - A look at the new Adobe Lightroom

LIGHTROOM CC 2018 - WALKTHROUGH & THOUGHTS 

A look at the latest version of Lightroom released by Adobe in October 2018.

Adobe have decided to split Lightroom into 2 versions (to add more confusion to their enormous plethora of overlapping products). Lightroom as we know it today will continue to exist as Lightroom Classic. While it feels like this product is being sidelined, Adobe have assured us that 'old' Lightroom will be supported and developed 'indefinitely'.

Update 2020: Lightroom Classic is still very much a product today.

Alongside it, Lightroom CC has been released.It seems that we have reached a tipping point in our connected world. 24/7 internet, cheaper mobile data tariffs, low cloud storage costs and good data transfer speeds mean that Google have decided to launch Google Drive where nothing is stored locally anymore. Your cloud drive is just a fully integrated network drive. In a similar fashion, Adobe now believe that RAW photo files are now manageable enough to store, manage and transfer in the cloud. This means they can be available on multiple devices (smartphone, web and desktop). This offering seems to work very well, however, not only does this tie you into Adobe yet further, it also allows them to sell their storage to you.

So rather than you using the cloud storage provider that you've had for years (Dropbox or whatever), you now have to use a different provider for your photos.

Lightroom CC is based entirely around this concept. It's a sleek, minimalist redesign of Lightroom Classic but does offer the same level of develop functions. It also immediately transfers your photos to the 'Creative Cloud' the moment you import them. This is nothing new. Adobe have been moving Lightroom to this way of working for years now but it's now a fundamental and unavoidable part of the application. Some features have been removed but you probably didn't use them anyway.

Take a look at the video to see how the software looks now and probably how we can expect it to look in the future.