Lightroom CC might offer slightly fewer tools but don’t be tricked – there’s easily enough here to get the best out of an image. If you’re power hungry, or want an application that will allow you to develop custom workflows that suit you best, Lightroom Classic is the obvious choice. The same goes for export, where there are fewer options for cloud-based users. Lightroom’s cloud version doesn’t let you do any of that. For example, staying organized exactly how you want is easier when importing images, as Lightroom Classic lets you decide just what happens to your images as they come into your catalogue – for example, you might decide you want your images deleted from their original media as they’re copied to a new location, or that you want a particular metadata preset or a group of keywords added to each file as it comes in.

This added customizability applies to just about everything in Lightroom Classic. That means that while Lightroom Classic is the more complex tool to use, the effects you can get from it are more fine-tunable. Pretty much every tool in Lightroom Classic goes further – look at the sharpening options, for example, and you can change not only how much sharpening is applied but also how it affects fine detail, the radius of the sharpening applied, and whether a mask is applied. The editing tools are vastly different as well, with Lightroom Classic offering much more powerful versions of the tools that the cloud-based version does. The cloud version simply isn’t designed to do the same thing. Want to find all the pictures you’ve ever shot at 1/10th of a second? Lightroom Classic makes that easy and near-instant. For instance, you can search for images shot on a particular model of camera, but Lightroom Classic allows you to filter not just by camera body but by lens, or even precise focal length, or aperture, or shutter speed. For example, of course the cloud version of Lightroom allows you to search images via text, in the keyword and caption metadata boxes, but only allows very basic filtering.

If you have a lot of images (my Lightroom library is now touching over 140,000 images, the overwhelming majority of them RAW), the cloud-based version of Lightroom simply doesn’t come close when it comes to navigating and searching very large repositories of photographs. If you can imagine it, you can probably do it here (Image credit: Dave Stevenson) Lightroom Classic offers endless tools for editing.

Lightroom classic for mac