Adobe Lightroom Reviews: 4.5/5 — Highly Rated

The overall usefulness and functionality of the software coupled with an exuberant amount of features. The integration with the rest of the Adobe stratosphere is a reason to stay!

Not a fully functional as Photoshop, however it's intended to be strictly for photo retouching. So having it be stripped down makes sense.

The benefits are definitely the integration of the

I have loved Photoshop Lightroom since the first version. If you are looking to edit photos, Photoshop Lightroom will deliver. It is more robust than photoshop and creates a better photo outcome. It also has a batch import which is helpful and time saving.

The saving process is confusing. My first few times in there I thought I was going to loose everything right away if I didnt complete the whole batch import.

I have seen benefits in the way that it saves me time to edit a lot of photos.

I like being able to do a lot of jobs in one place. Importing, adjusting, and sending to Libris or smugmug. I like that changes aren't made to original files. I like shooting tethered, I just wish it would work consistently.

I don't like how the retouching tools work... wish they were more like photoshop. I don't like how my Lightroom will stop enlarging images to 100% while I'm editing. The only thing that I've found that works is exiting out and relaunching Lightroom. Frustrating. Tethered shooting also really sucks. Wish it would work consistently. Annoying.

Takes less time to do basic stuff... I still have to go to photoshop to do retouching though. Nice to rename and upload stuff.

I love how we can edit and enhance the photos that were taken. All photos can be manipulated to create a whole new vibe and feel to the photo.

I dislike how we cannot cut and mask out parts and the stamp tool does not work very well. I often have to export the photo into photoshop for further edits.

We have taken many product photoshots and edited them in Lightroom to enhance each product photo. I have realized that all photography needs post edit after each initial shot.

Cataloging system, non-destructive editing, ability to add metadata, custom export features.

Some issues reading video files, catalog errors resulting in corrupted catalogs. When program crashes it can take a little while to reverify catalog when starting up.

Photography editing, archiving, exporting. Web galleries. PDFs/book

Lightroom is incredibly easy to use, and allows me to make quick photo touchups.

There isn't really anything that I don't like about Lightroom, perhaps the only thing was the initial learning curve, as it was the first adobe program I had ever used

Lightroom gives me a fast, easy, and consistent way to edit real estate photos. I can batch edit as well, which is extremely helpful when adjusting for the lens I am using, or for light.

My favorite feature of Adobe Lightroom is definitely the ability to batch edit photos by copying and pasting adjustments and applying them to many photos at once. This allows me to make general overall adjustments to large batches of pictures shot in the same setting or with same lighting - particularly useful for me as an event, portrait, and wedding photographer. The sliders make it so easy to make beautiful adjustments that are non destructive on both raw files and jpegs, tiffs, etc. I enjoy not having to use layers almost as much as I like being able to batch edit.

Lightroom has a tendency to get bogged down and run slowly/get stuck when working with a large catalog even on a lightning fast computer. I use some of the best hardware to date and the software just can't handle going through huge amounts of photos. I also wish it had a better sharpening feature. the built in sharpening just is not as good as an external plugin like Nik software, so I always have to pull my photos into Photoshop to do final sharpening. if this feature was improved, I wouldn't need photoshop for anything other than doing major photo manipulations.

Lightoom allows me to quickly batch edit and deliver huge amounts of proofs and even finalized photos to clients. It has cut my retouching time down by half as opposed to just using Photoshop. This software is absolutely necessary for all photographers no matter what kind of work you do. The time it saves me is the greatest benefit.

As a photographer, Lightroom's quick and easy raw photo editing features make it something that I could not live without. Lightroom allows you to organize your photos the way you want to and work with your photos in raw without sacrificing speed. The editing features offered are easily accessed and seen in real time. The program itself is easily navigated and on the whole yields awesome results for almost any photo. Additionally, presets allow me to further cut down on my work time.

The keyboard shortcuts are not easily found in the application itself. You'll need to do some research to get your hands on some of the tricks involved. I wish that photos could be reordered within filtered results.

Photoshop Lightroom allowed me to take a tedious and time consuming task and reduce my work time down to a small fraction of what was once required. As a real estate photographer, I am able to export photos in formats that meet my clients needs exactly.

I've been using Lightroom for many years and it's solid. The ability to go through all your photos and color correct within Lightroom has always been excellent and extremely easy to use! Also, the organization of photos inside of folders has always been a great feature to keep the thousands of photos shot on a monthly basis organized.

There actually isn't anything about Lightroom that I dislike. Through the years that I have been using Lightroom, I have gone through the various versions and updates to where it is today. With all those updates, features that were poor in the past have been vastly improved.

All of us on our team have been using Lightroom for years. It's extremely efficient in consideration of time and organization. We've also benefited quite a bit from sharing catalogs from one Lightroom user to another. Another benefit has been the integration of Lightroom with our Image Repository, PhotoShelter. This has cut out a few steps that used to slow us down quite a bit. This has been a great time saver.

Lightroom helps you edit an entire session consistently. You can create and save your own presets so if you're constantly shooting images that you want to turn out a certain way, you can just click the preset and voila! I highly recommend this program.

As of late, I've had a hard time re-ordering my photos. Also I wish it could auto-sync with my computer files so that if I moved files, it would know.

I'm a photographer that doesn't have time to spend editing photos after a shoot. With this software, I cut editing in half and am able to enjoy the important things - like my family!

The ease of manipulating photos out of the camera

touch sensitivity on a mac. I'd like to see it have the ability to adjust sensitivity.

over exposure.

It is very easy to batch edit using Lightroom. I have been a user for over 5 years and gone through different versions of the software. I will always come back to using it for large projects because it is so easy to batch edit.

The preview of large files can be slow at times. I solved this issue by purchasing an additional software to cull images before importing into Lightroom to batch edit.

Using photoshop can be time consuming for large projects. I can use Lightroom to batch edit quickly.

It's easy and quick to use. I love the batch editing, through the "sync" option. I love the ability to tag photos, rate them and flag them. I am also a huge fan of the "plug ins" that make uploading to websites and exporting photos a snap! I also love the ease of using a preset as well as custom edits.

I wish their was a better way to build collages and a better way to add text.

Lightroom sorts and organizes photos so well. It's a great program for people/companies who need to organize large volumes of photos. It allows clients to tag, flag, and rate photos which makes for easy searches.

The ability to quickly edit multiple photos at the same time. I especially like being able to apply the same color corrections to a number of photos if the lighting/coloring is similar.

It takes a while to upload and export photos

I was using photoshop a lot but needed to do hundreds of photos for a website. This proved to be a more practical product

Lightroom is a specialized software, easy to use, and it shares its interface with the rest of the adobe family, so you pick it up quite fast from the beginning. I really like the way you can combine filters and settings and then saving that savings to reuse them anytime later.

I don't like the way Lightroom creates a image library, I hate seeing not work-related images taken automatically to the software library, it's the same reason why I don't use similar softwares like iPhoto.

One of the most efficient things about Lightroom is that you can treat and edit photos by batches, this makes the workflow much more efficient for both professional and amateur photographers.

Lightroom and Photoshop are two tools I use everyday and they take up 80% of my workflow. Lightroom helps me process the RAW files, making them more suitable for the editing. Lightroom has a powerful rating system: that's invaluable help when it comes to selecting your raw shots. I wouldn't be able to work as fast as I do without such feature. Another powerful feature then is the filters: after rating the shots, you can easily isolate them and move on to the second step of selection. I've got the CS6 version and it's just amazing: you can do a lot on the RAW files and it's really helpful to be able to do such a thing in an environment where you can also organize, rate and filter shots. I used to use Camera Raw for RAW editing, but now there's no point in doing it anymore. Lightroom also has astonishing implementations such as the "Edit in..." and the new "Photomerge" which, together with the feature that allows you to build up pano photos and HDR photos, make this tool a must have for photographers. Lightroom is such an all-out piece of software that it can also be used as a standalone tool for those who don't feel like going as far as using Photoshop. In fact you can also automatically place watermarks, save and convert in the format you want and many other actions on multiple images at the same time. Photoshop doesn't do that.

It's only a bit complex when it comes to the cataloguing, I mean the Library part. I'm never very clear on which pictures it still has in its library and which pictures have been removed. And the bottom bar as well is not so easy to use. I mean, it's probably because of me, I use a 13-inch MacBook Pro 90% of the time: maybe people with larger screens will feel more comfortable using the bottom tool.

I've been able to process RAW files way faster than before, being able to organize them clearly and to go over a three-step selection by using rating and filtering. Not little, I'd venture to say.

My absolute favorite feature of lightroom is the ability to save settings and apply them to batches of photos at the click of a button. This is incredibly useful when you have tweaked a photo that was part of a large session. Typically the settings will be the same for each photo, and with lightroom, you can essentially paste the tweak settings and then batch export! Awesome.

The one think i'm not crazy about is the photo organization. I find that my library is really just a bunch of folders, and I tend to prefer the timeline style organization that is seen in iPhoto (Photos) or Flickr. The organization is good for professional use, but not as family friendly for chronological even order.

I am constantly using lightroom for enhanced photo manipulation for clients. The range of looks available able and the ease of application is awesome. Setting the right tone for clients through imagery is important. I used to do most of this tweaking in photoshop, but i now I've changed my workflow to start with lightroom and go from there. I love the software and the power than the presets and plugins provide. There is so much power there

What can't you do in Photoshop? Photoshop is a must-have for any professional working in any sort of design capacity. It's been around for decades and as such has any feature you could ever need and is continuously adding new ones. There is no alternative. It has a highly intuitive interface, and allows you to do anything from basic design to creating and altering normal maps for 3D use.

There really isn't much to dislike about it, other than sometimes when I go to 'OPEN' a file, I click 'BROWSE IN BRIDGE' instead, and it really pisses me off.

It allows me to be creative while giving me the tools to work efficiently and practically.

The interface and complete tools that offered by the software.

Need other Adobe's software to create more creative type of arts.

the mobility from this app, that i could access my data on other device, so i can edit stuffs using another software on another device.

I really love everything about this product. I would have to say one of my favorite features is the ability to upload directly online for client proof pages of images. But there are so many great features from quick fixes to photos to advanced photo editing capabilities, this is a must have for anyone that is even in the realm of photomanipulation, correction, adjustment, etc.

The only thing that I don't like right now is that I use CC and it doesn't have the capability of importing RAW Canon photos ... I have to convert them to jpg or dng using photoshop ONLY because this version doesn't support that capability. Soon enough, I hope, they will fix/update this!

So many business solutions are solved from utilizing Lightroom: 1. I'm able to quickly import any photos that I take and apply overall color correction and adjustment at the drop of a hat. 2. I can flag / rate / reject any images that deem worthy. 3. Obviously, advanced photo editing development properties. 4. Image uploads to online or export for email for proofing is great as well. 5. SOOO many options, great product!

Lightroom is a space where you find the most of your work as a photographer. I found the UI and UX amazing to discover the frontiers of the image itself. Moreover, I consider that the application has the amazing strength of keeping you organised. It is invaluable due to the fact that organising libraries sometimes it's pretty pailful.

Lightroom helps our own workflow, but it is not always as independent as it can be. Some aspects of photoshop are required to develop a good product. It means that not only understanding Lightroom is enough to get the final result.

I constantly try to develop product photography and landscape photography. Those two worlds require a completely different settings on terms of image development. However, Lightroom gives enough flexibility to get the best results in both areas.

The simple to use interface. Different modules for editing image & lay-outing are the best. The Library module helps with arranging the images and for quick edits. Develop module for detailed color correction and edit. The color engine works really well with different image formats & camera models. The preset library is the best way for quick edits.

The web section can be improved to integrate more modern design layouts.

Batch export. Fast & efficient workflow. Ease of project management. Multi-platform integration.

I love Lightroom, I mostly use the Library and Development features, I love how easily it syncs with Photoshop and the ability to adjust the Raw Images. I love the printing feature too and being able to set up a template to export as a jpeg.

There isn't much I don't like about Lightroom, I have been very happy with it and have used it since the very first beta came out. I have been impressed with the changes as they have come out. Maybe an easier way to upload to social media accounts.

Organizing and accessing my images, the ability to export with a watermark for posting online.

Lightroom gives you control over your photos. It works off the concept of a catalog, so instead of making copies of the pictures inside the app itself (i.e. Apple Photos) it can add pictures to its catalog and leave the pictures wherever you want. This is great if your photos span the range of multiple hard drives. Organizing photos is excellent and many tools take away a lot of pain of going through hundreds if not thousands of shots at once. I especially love the Quick Collection feature that allows me to hit a key and add a photo to a collection that I can later save to a more permanent "album". The developing features are also quite robust, allowing you to edit a wide array of features, and if you can't quite get done what you want in Lightroom, it's tight integration with Photoshop allows even greater editing for the perfect shot. Also, when you edit, the edits are non-destructive, so you can make as many copies from the master negative as you want.

There's not much to dislike for what I use Lightroom for. There are times where I wish for a way to view my photos categorized by date like what Apple or Google Photos does, but that really isn't the point. Sometimes it can also be a bit difficult figuring out where things are, since it can do so much.

Photo management and editing

I can edit my photos to make them look incredibly professional in 5 minutes per photo, MAX. Easy to use UI

Don't like that I have to pay on a subscription basis

Saves time - I don't have to agonize over photo setup and post processing is quite easy

The biggest timesaver Lightroom provides is being able to copy all the formatting and adjustments on one photograph and then paste those on another photo, or even sync all those with a series of selected photographs This way a certain level of consistency in style is maintained. I also love the ability to publish to other online services is a big time saver. Before anything, it is important to understand that RAW photographs are what allows Lightroom to fine tune adjustments. JPG's simply don't have enough range to do much with them. That doesn't mean it doesn't work. Some filters still do a lot of great corrections to a jpg image. Finally, one powerful tool is the healing tool. Being able to fix dust on a photo with a few clicks is super easy.

The upgrade process is now forcing you to get onto a regular online payment plan. The memory and power it needs. But at the same time, it is understandable that more power is needed to be able to smoothly edit. File management isn't that intuitive.

Being able to directly upload into my online albums with watermarks included as well as custom pricing schedules saves me a lot of time.

its a powerful photo editing tool that can easily import, edit and export photos. What i really like the most about this product is you can custom made your filters or buy any filter packs such as VSCOfilms and import the packs to be used inside the app flawlessly. Its affordable, and easy to use. Can be learn and know how to use just by 15 mins.

sometimes the app have bugs that does not show the current filter i was using so i need to scroll and click on random filter to fix this. Its actually a minor problem but it can affect your editing momentum as you need to choose only one filter out of thousands when editing. Consider getting a good condition pc or notebook with great display if youre going to use this app as it will effect the performance of the app itself and the result. (highly recommended for MAC users with retina display) but other than that is still okay.

Enhancing poor or old photographs to make it look better. Add value to a dull photograph using tool kit inside the app. Fix the mood or the quality of a photograph. Edited up to 300 photos for my assignment just by one and a half hour using this app, and the result is splendid.

It is an extremely powerful editing tool with near perfect integration into Photoshop for detail editing. Nothing else comes close.

It can be a bit difficult to manage files and online training is sparse for certain topics. The defringe tool is also kind of quirky - if localized defringing was easier, then this product would be a 10/10.

Editing photos for art. Finding lightroom did more to improve my photography skill than anything else. Also, simply working with the editing tools has taught me about photography and new potential applications for art and other creative ideas.

it's easy to create presets to batch process your work and speed up your workflow.

Trying to figure out the best way to manage my files and not have links to the photos break.

I use Lightroom to speed up my photography workflow after photo shoots. The benefit is that I can process all of my images in a fraction of the time it used to take.

I'm biased because I'm an early adopter (but I hated the Beta and Lr 1, but moved from PS to Lr 2 as soon as it was released), but over the last (nearly) 10 years it has quickly become the industry standard. It is perfect for importing, organizing, adding metadata right away. The ability to create unique catalogs for different projects, creating collections/collection sets/etc., flagging, rating, color labels, keywording, etc. has made it nearly impossible to lose a photograph.

I don't use this word lightly, but I hate the CC Subscription. Especially as a photo educator, where I make next to nothing (between cost of living and student loans, my university does not provide faculty development funding, so I can barely afford to make my work, which falls under the required "scholarship" category needed for tenure), and I couldn't afford the $30+ (w/tax) a month for the CC Suite, but I'm still paying $120+ a year for just Lr and PS. While students don't have much money, unless you're in a two-income household, a fine art photographer makes even less (they can at least go to parents or take out loans with little to no interest). Cost is difficult.

I do not deal with the business side of this software, as I am not allowed to practice freelance during my academic year contract (Sept - mid June), so it is those few months that I have time to do my work. (Personally, it's a double standard. In photo we have one foot in studio arts and one in digital media/design. My design colleagues are able to take on client work and use it towards their "scholarship" whereas I cannot do the same. I have a feeling that this is unique to my current university, which I am leaving... So if any jobs are available for artists/educators/consultants are available, I'm all ears!