Hey there! I just released Episode 7 of my Frame of Mind Photography Podcast.
Episode 7 Topic – What’s the Future of Lightroom?
In Episode 7, Brian Matiash has joined me once again. This week, we give our thoughts on what the future of Lightroom may be. We talk about Lightroom Classic as well as Lightroom (the cloud based version, which isn’t all cloud based anymore).
How to Listen/Watch
You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google. Or you can watch it below.
The podcast is NOT intended to be visual in any way, so all you’re doing is watching the two of us talk and nothing else. But if that’s the way you prefer it, feel free. Personally, podcasts are something I listen to when I have nothing else to do, or to keep me busy while doing something else – so I never watch them.
Apple Podcast Link (Click Here)
Spotify Podcast Link (Click Here)
Google Podcasts Link (Click Here)
PRO TIP: I typically listen to podcasts on my phone while driving or in the gym. And I usually set most podcasts to 1.25x – 1.5x speed to get through it faster.
Since this IS NOT A TRAINING tutorial, and it’s just us talking, I think you can speed us up and get through it faster so feel free to give it a try. I can’t help you find that setting, but again… most podcast apps have it so poke around. If you can use Lightroom and Photoshop I have no doubt you can figure out how to use a podcast app 😉
I love teaching and photography... In that order. I feel that enjoying photography, and photo editing can get WAY too complicated. So my personal mission (and favorite thing to do), is to create education that simplifies the process of taking great photos, and how to edit them to get the results you’ve always wanted.
Hi Matt, I have been a long-time user of Adobe Photoshop (started with v3) and Lightroom (now Classic) since it was first released. I have yet to try “Lightroom”. I hope you will clear up a few items not spelled out in your podcast.
How does Lightroom local save the edits? In one comment it was stated that they are saved in dng files which my phone creates but not my professional cameras. You made it sound like they may be saved in XMP files when you mentioned bringing photos out of Classic into Lightroom. Is that the standard way? Do you know of any software that can bulk rename the raw file and its associated XMP sidecar file with the same filename? Can Bridge?
In the podcast it was stated that Lightroom could be used in airplane mode without a connection to the internet. In my travels I often don’t have access to the internet, or I have a very slow connection. Can I copy photos to my local USB drive and edit them in Lightroom local without ever having an internet connection?
Keep creating your podcast. I am enjoying them and learning from them.
Hi Leo.
1) How does it save local edits? I have no idea. I’m happy to be rid of thinking how or where a program saves my edits. As long as it does and as long as my computer is backed up I can always get them back. But I can tell you it’s not in DNG.
2) I don’t use Lightroom for the cloud aspect and the workflow I’m using has nothing to do with cloud so my internet connection doesn’t matter. But yes, LR even works if you’re not connected to the cloud (it always did btw…)
3) Copy to local usb drive? Yes… I would never use something that didn’t allow this.
Changes in “Local” are saved
RAW – as xmp files with the original
JPG – are saved in the JPG, what I call , metadata area.
But like said, it doesn’t matter as long that it does.
I’m enjoying learning from the podcasts. One point of misinformation is about Skylum, who I am an affiliate. They only have one product, Luminar Neo. Plus, they have a lifetime option. They had sky replacement before Photoshop did…
I a major hoarder issue with my photos with over a million pictures in my Lightroom catalog. It is Collections that has kept me in Lightroom. Can I migrate them to Local?
Thanks!
Thanks. I guess recently I did see Luminar and Neo on there. Maybe not now, but it hasn’t been that long.
As for collections, stay tuned. There is a way, though my workflow is to recommend you leave what you have in LR Classic and use Lightroom for photos moving forward.
My point is that Skylum only has one product called Luminar Neo. It is a photo editor platform and you can purchase extensions like Focus Stacking, Sharpening, DeNoise, Panoramas, and they recently releasing three AI tools that are sent to their servers: GenErase , SceneExpand, and SceneSwap.
Also, I guess I am one of the few that likes the Import module, as it sets a preset for lens corrections, makes a second copy, and creates the folder structure for me. If I go Local Lightroom, then I have to do those steps manually.
You’re definitely part of the few, but if it works for you it works. I’d never want to break a workflow some one is happy with. Not every tutorial I do is useful for everyone and this sounds like it won’t be for you. Thanks!
Hi Matt
I enjoy your podcasts.
I’ve been a Photoshop user since version 2. In 2006 I started to write my own software to manage my images and do some rudimentary editing.
It was about 90% ready when the first version of Lightroom was released. I scrapped my development and have since then used Lightroom and I have a subscription to the full Adobe palette of applications.
I have around half a million images – since year 2000 – in two LR catalogues. There are probably about 30% bracketed images, which I don’t need. Actually, you are to ‘blame’ for all these brackets. I started bracketing my shots because of something you said a looong time ago. You said that when you bracket your shots, you can be sure to have at least one good exposure without having to stop and check on the display if it is ok, and you can directly move to the next shot. It was and still is good advice, and I don’t regret following it.
Listening to this podcast got me very interested in Lightroom everywhere and I bought Brian’s course. I have now finished it and I think that I have a good understanding of the system. I have also uploaded a few hundred pictures to the cloud using synced collections and have worked on these in Lightroom.
To make a long story short, I’ve decided to stay with Lightroom Classic, but also to use Lightroom with selected collections to be able to view the images on other devices and to share albums.
A contributing fact to my decision was that I’m 80 years old, and if your prediction, that LR Classic will live at least 10 years, there is a good chance that it will outlive me 😊.
Hi Danny. Thanks for the message. The workflow of using the cloud, as demonstrated in Brian’s course, isn’t the workflow I’d recommend. Brian’s course is meant for some one “all in” on Lightroom’s cloud version and intends on doing everything in the cloud. I don’t think that’s a viable alternative for Classic users. So don’t make your decision until you really see the non-cloud features of Lightroom (coming soon). Thanks.
I liked your podcast. After listening to it I still don’t see why I should want to switch to the cloud version. I think it will not be that big a deal when I have to switch from Lightroom Classic to the cloud version. It seems like their will, however, be things I will miss. Nothing critical and their will be workarounds, but still little announces. So when they day comes that I have to switch, I will, and I’m sure it will workout fine. I would like to see more discussion of the positives of switching. What will I get that I don’t have now with Lightroom Classic.
Hi David. For me, I now have the super simple workflow I’ve always wanted and I’m able to look at my photos and edit them faster (and that’s 100% all I care about). If you’re looking for more features and more positives than what I just mentioned, it’s not the workflow for you. For years, I organized my photos on a hard drive and then imported them in to LR to just look at the same Folder organization I just did – but yet I had to go through the catalog. For what?… I don’t keyword/Metadata – I don’t use Maps, or Slideshows. The few books I make I usually do through Apple Books – and for years I’ve thought that Epson Print Layout was better than the Print module. So why go through all that trouble using a program with all of that bloat, that didn’t let me use a laptop, desktop and phone/tablet when I wanted?
For me, I want the fastest way possible to look at photos and the fastest way to get them to a “wow” point. That is all I care about.
Anyway, judging from the backlash I’ve already seen, people will resist this, and that’s fine. Mostly because of the word “cloud” when in fact, this version of LR hasn’t been named “cloud” in years, and my workflow has nothing to do with anything cloud-based. People don’t like change and I get it. But after months of using it, I haven’t looked back.
In short, I’ve been teaching this stuff for over 20 years. I know what pain points people have and quickly looking through photos… and making them look amazing, is by far the largest pain point I’ve heard. This workflow helps that. And as difficult as it will be to push through this (because I already see the resistance), I want the best for my viewers, and I’m certain this is it. It may not be the answer for everyone (mostly the vocal minority), but I 100% know it is for the majority. And the best part… it’s free to try and it won’t mess up anything about existing workflows. Thanks! 🙂
Matt, I listened to “What’s the future of Lightroom.” I am one of those anchored in Lightroom Classic. I found the discussion interesting and it spiked my interest in utilizing Lightroom. You stated that you haven’t used Lightroom Classic in a month. What recommendations do you have to help bring me up to speed. Thanks in advance and keep up the good work with the podcasts.
Ken Lawfield
Hi Ken. I’ll have a course coming out in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, keep it simple. Open up Lightroom. Click the “Local” tab. Navigate to a folder and edit a photo. It’s hard to make it any more complicated than that. You can’t mess anything up. There is no catalog. Nothing will get permanently changed and there’s no downside to just poking around. It’s ridiculously simple – which is what will actually make it hard for people 🙂
Matt,
I enjoyed your current episode, along with all previous episodes. I hope you keep on doing it. On the other hand, I am worried that you may run out of topics one day. But I hope you keep on coming with such timely discussions.
I had one question about something you mentioned in this episode. Near the end you said, something like this: there is no print module in Lightroom because you really do not need it, if you print on Canon use their proprietary software which is far superior to Classic’s print module, same for Epson.
My question is, I send images to Bay Photo-like places as a file for commercial printing. What is the best Printing software I can use to get the best results?
Kirit Vora
Hi Kirit. Thanks and glad you like the podcast.
If you print yourself, Epson and Canon both have software that comes with the printer that I suggest to use. It doesn’t have anything to do with printing at a lab though. Hope that helps.
I listened to the podcast over the weekend and it literally changed my life – thank you again.
I had recently purchased a new Mac Studio. In the past I had a PC with a ton of local storage that then backed up to a NAS. I was hoping that the Mac Studio & the NAS, both with 10Gb ethernet, could work well together in Classic. Wow was I wrong. With over 20TB of photos it was just not working well at all. I was stuck in a total morass from last Wed-Sat.
Saturday I was out shooting sports (volleyball and football) – on the way home I listened to this podcast and its like the two of you were talking directly to me.
When I got home I did all my editing for the day on Lightroom (not Classic). I am converted. I also can now access all my old photos on the NAS very easily with Lightroom since its a browser – not a catalog. All the edits show up since I have always used DNG files and the edits are embedded. I feel liberated from the catalog – long live the browser!
Thanks again for this – seriously a life saver – the timing could not have been better (both with Adobe’s update and your podcast). As a kicker I am now using the Adobe Cloud for my edited images. The extra $10/month saved me $4000 in local storage I was going to have to buy!
It’s been a couple weeks now since I wrote those comments for Kelby’s post on Lightroom Killer Tips. And I’ve been using Lr full time since then. The only thing I’ve been doing in LrC is cleaning up files. been a lot of deleting going on.
There’s still a couple things I wish Lr had, but it’s no big deal now. I’ve found ways that it works for me with almost no pain or frustration. It’s just a new normal. And I LIKE It.
I highly recommend Brian’s Lightroom Everywhere course. ( not sponsored by 🙂 ) It made a big difference for me. Also looking forward to whatever Matt is putting together for a new course. Thanks – Tim
Interesting discussion on Lightroom and Classic. I’m actually pretty chilled about the eventual demise of Classic even though I’m a committed user and I think its an indispensable piece of software. That’s because I assume that once Classic development is paused, it will because Lightroom Desktop will be as good or better than Classic. Your podcast touched on some features that Classic has that LR Desktop doesn’t. BUT amongst the things NOT mentioned that I use all the time in Classic that aren’t in LR Desktop or Mobile (yet) are: Published Services; Book module; Map module; and Print Module. And before anyone hits the reply button, I KNOW that there are work arounds to all these but the big selling point to Classic that remains relevant today are that it is a super efficient end-to-end process: asset manage; develop; output. The biggest plus point of Classic after the Develop module has to be the Published Services. It makes managing changes to my website unbelievably quick and efficient. I’d be gutted if there aren’t equally efficient ways to achieve all the things offered by CLassic’s outputs modules.
Hi Martin. It’s not that there aren’t work arounds… it’s that the key features you mention are not features that are increasing in popularity. If you use those modules just understand you are in the minority. NO company is actively developing those features because people don’t use them (yes, I understand you do, but I’m talking bigger picture). So the problem is that you don’t even have alternatives and the options you do have will diminish in the future. You can’t expect Adobe to put manpower and money behind features they know for certain don’t get used. And other companies are probably just thanking fate that they never invested in those features to begin with. So if/when LR Classic does go away or you’ll want to leave it, you won’t really have alternatives.
That said, Books are far better using an online service. If you print you should be using Epson Print Layout or Canon Print Studio pro anyway… and as for Maps – I got nuttin’. I run in to 1 person a year using it and you have fulfilled that person for 2023 🙂 Thanks!
Matt,
Another question for you if I may. Do you think Adobe will sunset Camera Raw in favor of Lr as you (and Brian) predict for LrC? My thinking is why not just disregard all of this drama of Lr vs LrC and use one program – Photoshop which includes ACR? I’m already beginning to think that using two programs (LrC and PS) to edit my photos is somewhat silly when I could be using just one (am I missing something)? And Bridge to access my photos. I think Bridge is just as functional if not more so than the Local tab in LR. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
Bob
They will not. Camera Raw is a feature of Photoshop. Remember that not everyone that has to edit a photo is a photographer with a photographer’s workflow. You’ll have designers that need to open a raw photo and they shouldn’t have to go to an entirely new program just to do that. As for Bridge being just as functional, not really. Who wants to look at photos and then have to have a separate step to edit them in ACR. Then if you realize you didn’t edit a photo, you have to leave ACR, go back to Bridge, then open ACR again. It’s just clunky when you have a great app that does it for you.
While I had seen the news about the Local tab in the release notes for Lightroom, I had not had a chance to look at it, so thanks for going into that – much appreciated, and I will have to check it out. I’ll admit, after hearing you talk about it, I was cautiously looking forward to trying it out, until I read through all of the answers to Scott Kelby’s question and saw everything that currently isn’t there (more on that below). Still, I am looking forward to seeing how things develop from here.
That said, it was kind of hard to ignore the mental backflip you did early in the episode, first noting that many people erroneously believe the 1TB plan to be “new” and represent a price increase, but then going to great lengths to explain why nobody needs more than 1TB of cloud storage, thereby basically committing anyone wanting to sync between devices to the $20/mo plan. You literally just said that the 20GB plan still exists, then explained exactly why the 20GB plan will almost certainly not be sufficient for syncing with Lightroom. I can use the 20GB plan with LrC because Smart Previews don’t count against the 20GB quota, but if I started syncing raw files, that would be a completely different story.
The long section of the episode where you went over some of the answers to Kelby’s question might have seemed like you were just speaking fundamental, hard truths that nobody wants to hear – and it is a pity that so many of the answers to the question didn’t seem to understand that Lightroom runs on Mac/PC, or that it no longer requires using Adobe’s cloud storage – but underneath it all was a seemingly unconsidered dismissiveness toward the needs of professional users of Adobe’s software. Combined photo management and raw processing for enthusiastic amateurs and professionals started with Aperture (which I was a very happy user of), followed soon after by Lightroom (which I’ve been using since it was in beta). Aperture has long-since departed the scene, replaced by the not-fit-for-professionals Photos app. The thought that Adobe would also basically abandon their professional users – that is, users who need specific features that are present in LrC, but not needed by the great masses of photographers that mostly use their smartphones – in a quixotic quest to somehow capture some small portion of the market that is not happy with the built-in photo processing/management apps in every modern operating system and is willing to pay for something better, is not something those professional (or even enthusiastic amateur) users are going to be happy to hear. Does Adobe need to chase this market of non-professionals? Almost certainly, but does it have to be at the expense of the core professional users of their software?
This is a group of people – yes, certainly decreasing, both as a percentage of overall photographers, and probably also in absolute terms – that has had access to serious, professional Adobe software for well over a decade, and have developed workflows oriented to the features of that software. To be told “nobody uses that feature, so you shouldn’t expect to see it added to newer software going forward” ignores that there are still substantial numbers of people who make their living actually using said software to produce work for clients, not just teaching other people how to use it (no offense intended – educators play an important role). I’ve been a professional photographer for well over a decade, typically working at the lower end of the commercial market, but even I saw several features that people stated were missing in the current version of Lightroom that I use with every commercial client shoot. Does a large enough percentage of “content creators” use those features to get Adobe to migrate them to the newer software? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Finally, I was a bit surprised that there was no real acknowledgment that photography doesn’t represent the same thing to everyone. For some people, it’s a way to make a living; to others, it’s a way to capture moments to share with other people with similar interests or camera equipment; to another group, it might be to document various things they’ve seen traveling around the neighborhood/state/country/world; still others might see their photos as a visual diary, reminders of moments that fade from memory with time. Members of all of these groups probably started using LrC at some point in the last 15 years, and have become used to the way it works and what it allows them to do with their photos. If moving to Lightroom was simply a case of learning a new interface with a a couple missing features and some things rearranged, I don’t think you’d see much complaining. However, asking people to move to a different product with many missing features (some of which had been designed for advanced/professional users) and a history of having been intended for a very different kind of user (some answers pointed out that Scott Kelby himself has called the newer software “Lightroom for children”) is not going to be an easy sell.
I have no doubt that Adobe has plans to move everyone to one platform at some point, probably sooner than later. I hope that they take most of the very real concerns of current LrC users to heart as they move in that direction, as I’m sure nobody wants to deal with a repeat of the “I’ll never subscribe to software” days.
If I’m using Lightroom tocal tab sync my RAW file to the cloud will it be using smart previews or full file upload?
Matt,
I have a question for you about what is currently holding me back from not using the LrC Library. You mentioned in this video that with your last 4 or so shoots you copied the photos directly to your HD and used Lr and did not touch LrC and I presume the catalog. Are you concerned that you are now breaking the connection to your catalog? If not, why not? To me this is a significant step I am trying to wrap my head around so as not to make a bad decision. In other words, this seems like a scenario that one cannot undo once one starts using Lr in lieu of LrC and its catalog. Thanks so much.
Bob
Hi Bob. There is no catalog. What I do in LR will not be seen in LRC. And I’m okay with that. When I need access to older photos I know where to go (LRC). But for newer photos I now have an easy way to view/work on them. And if I later decide that I want to put those photos in to LRC, then I just import them and get to work just like always. You may be overthinking it a bit or at least over estimating the cohesiveness of these two programs (meaning there is none). Thanks!
Hello,
I enjoy your frank discussions about software. Sometimes I’m not sure if you’re trying to encourage or discourage photography. On the one hand, Adobe is the best raw developer but on the other hand, most of our photos aren’t good enough to keep so does it matter? (all in good fun). I am not an Adobe hater (except for Flash which is a separate issue :)). Now that Lightroom has the local tab I might even go back when it supports plugins. When I began editing photos seriously I purchased Aperture (which went away), then Google NIK (which went away), then Lightroom (which went subscription), so I am naturally suspicious of software companies telling me what the future is. One point in favor of Adobe is the buy-in cost. Even if the annual upgrade price is similar, you don’t have to start by paying full price up front. In favor of annual upgrades, if there is no new feature I need, I don’t have to upgrade every year.
I know you have many years of experience with Adobe but if you were starting today, would you still choose it? Or is there something just as good / close enough that is perhaps more user friendly that you would choose? Thanks!
Hi Charles. Yes, I would choose Adobe if I started today. The only other program that’s even in the same ballpark as far as a raw editor and the quality of edits is Capture One. And it’s nowhere near Adobe when it comes to masking, and Photoshop and all of the other stuff we get for $9.99 a month (and C1 costs twice as much per year).
Thanks Matt,
Now that I can use the local option, I will subscribe for a couple of months this winter. I’m usually editing more then due to weather. Then I can compare and keep the Raw files as well as processed TIFFs. That way I can pay $20 – $30 per year and see how it goes.
Excellent podcast. I completely missed the update on Lightroom and the local feature. For about a year I’ve been using the ecosystem to some collections to sync LRC to the cloud to easily share images.