Photoshop Lightroom (5.4) and Lightroom Classic (11.4)

Organise, edit and share shots from iPhone or Mac

- George Cairns

£9.98/month (as part of Adobe's Photography Plan with 20GB of online storage) > FROM adobe.com/uk >

NEEDS Lightroom Classic needs macOS 10.15 or later; Lightroom CC needs macOS 11 or later; Lightroom CC for iOS needs iOS 13 or later

With help from Al, you can create a mask to selectively adjust a complex shape

Earlier this year, Adobe announced major updates to its Lightroom apps so we thought the time is right to take look at what’s new, plus compare the two versions of Lightroom to see which one might best suit your needs as a photographer. Lightroom comes in two ‘flavours’– the original desktop-based Lightroom (rebranded as Lightroom Classic) and the newer streamlined Lightroom. We’ll refer to the newer version as Lightroom CC (Creative Cloud) to help differentiate between the two apps in this review.

So what are the differences between the two versions? The original desktop Lightroom Classic has long been the app of choice for professional photographers who need to organise and edit a large collection of assets on their Macs. Lightroom Classic creates a catalogue that knows exactly where each photo is stored and what keywords and edits have been applied to it, which is very helpful if you have thousands of photos scattered across multiple external drives. It also boasts a collection of modules – Print, Slideshow, Book, and Web – that enable you to share your work in a variety of ways.