Adobe Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic: Which should you use?

damn it adobe why do you confuse us like this yo what's up guys welcome back to the channel and welcome to my little jungle here um honestly my studio doesn't usually look like this but i was just shooting a course for skillshare so it's nice and pretty right now but i'm going to move it back to my usual desk set up here soon if you guys want to see more about the studio you want to see behind the scenes a studio tour let me know in the comments down below and i will make that for you but today we're going to be talking about the difference between adobe lightroom classic and adobe lightroom clearly adobe likes to mess with us they're making all these names they're changing the names all the time and it's so confusing a lot of my new students come to me and they say sean are you using lightroom classic or are you using lightroom and i don't know the difference between the two what should i be using well we're going to be exploring that in this video i'm going to show you guys the positives and negatives of both softwares and also help you decide on which one you should choose and also give you a little bit of insight into my workflow and which ones i use disclaimer i actually use both and i have a workflow that works really well for me but hopefully by the end of this video you can have a little bit of clarity on which one you should be using as well also if you guys haven't checked it out yet i'm giving away a free orange and teal preset pack there's a link in the description you can head to my website download those those are completely free and i hope you enjoy them [Music] okay so let's get into the details here let's talk about the main differences between lightroom classic and lightroom well the main difference is basically where your original photos are stored with lightroom classic you must store all of your photos locally so that means either on your computer or on an external hard drive so for me personally i store all of my images on these this is a sandisk 2 terabyte ssd what i do is after i come home from a shoot i upload them onto this and then i import them into lightroom so the originals always stay on this and if i want to edit my photos in lightroom classic i must have this with me now on the flip side of that lightroom is a completely cloud-based software that means whenever you import photos into lightroom they're automatically uploaded to the cloud and that is where they stay so what's so great about that is all of your photos are backed up instantly so something happens and your hard drive gets corrupted and all your photos are gone you don't have to worry because they're still gonna be up in the cloud and with lightroom classic if i lose this and it's not backed up my photos are gone forever because they're not in the cloud and that's exactly why if you're using lightroom classic you need to take backups seriously either you buy two of these and you basically copy it over to another one and keep that safe somewhere or you upload it to the cloud using a service like backblaze that's what i personally use to backup my work and i'll leave a link in the description for that but if you are somebody that has a hard time backing up your work and you forget about it quite often lightroom might be a better option for you because backups really are super important now the other main difference between these two softwares is lightroom classic is only desktop and lightroom can be used on any of your devices so it can be used on your desktop on your mobile on your tablet and that is really nice you know being able to conveniently edit anywhere at all in bed on the road and standing in line at the grocery store having that convenience is really important and i know i personally appreciate being able to edit on my smaller device from time to time now the next main difference between these two softwares is their ease of use and also some of the features that they have so lightroom classic does have a few more features that lightroom does not have for example range masking with the selective adjustments tool if you guys have seen my video on the most important feature in adobe lightroom classic you will know that i absolutely love that tool and it's essential for me in my editing process but i know that it's not essential for everybody it's kind of a more advanced tool that maybe only professional photographers would use and the same thing goes with color calibration sliders those don't exist in lightroom but they do exist in lightroom classic and not everyone needs to use those so for the most part i think this isn't something that should be a major factor unless you really are going to be meticulously editing your images and spending a lot of time on them and if you are a professional photographer i think you need to be using lightroom classic for these features but if you're just an amateur photographer and you're not necessarily stressed about getting the tip-top perfect edit and spending all this time on your edits then i don't think these features are must-have also this causes lightroom classic to be a bit more confusing and have a slightly steeper learning curve than lightroom lightroom is much easier to understand than lightroom classic because of the way the sliders are organized and i really love how lightroom does this they have separate tabs with everything that you need within those tabs so for example under the light tab you have all of your exposure contrast and tone adjustments so everything is in that light tab then the color tab you have your white balance you have your color grading you have your hsl sliders everything for color is in that specific box and the same goes for effects and details and i really really love that workflow that's actually the same workflow that i teach in my lightroom classic class however lightroom classic is just not intuitive or as streamlined as lightroom is it's also worth mentioning that adobe is constantly updating lightroom and i think that the features that currently exist on lightroom classic and that don't exist on lightroom are going to be added to lightroom in the next few years they've already added so many features that weren't there in the beginning and i think the differences between the actual editing capabilities are closing day by day okay and the last main difference between these two softwares is the way that your photos are organized and sorted so with lightroom classic everything is manual you have to keyword everything manually so if there's a picture of a tree you actually have to physically type the keyword tree into the keyword metadata so then lightroom classic can associate that image with a tree and you also have to make sure that your file structure is organized as well for example all my photos are organized based on the year the month and then the day and i also put a little note about where that was shot what kind of trip it was on etc if you have a hard time doing this if you're not good with manual organization then adobe lightroom is a little bit easier in that regard it sorts things automatically it uses a ai technology called adobe sensei which i honestly think is the future of photo editing and i'm going to get into that in a little bit here but what's so great about lightroom is it automatically scans and reads all of the information in your images and then you can use the search bar on top to search for honestly anything you can search for colors you can search for specific objects like cars or trees and lightroom will automatically find images with those things in them using its ai technology and then present those options to you there it can also read faces and it creates a separate album for everyone with different faces um and if it recognizes two people that look similar it'll ask you is this the same person should we merge these together and honestly i think that's a really cool feature especially for people that are shooting for fun and they just want an editing software that's a little bit easy to use and more intuitive but yeah i really do like that automatic tagging and intelligent search feature i think it's really awesome for a lot of people i personally haven't found a way to implement it into my workflow yet but i do see it becoming a useful feature for me in the future okay so those are the main differences between lightroom and lightroom classic but now you might be thinking yourself okay sean you just confused the hell out of me i don't know which one i should be using help me out and don't worry i got you i've put together a few different questions you can ask yourself to help you decide on which one is better for you and the first question you should ask yourself is how many photos do you shoot if you're like me and you take a ton of photos and you shoot in raw which means you have big file sizes you're working with a lot of data using lightroom's cloud-based system is just not going to work i can't realistically store all of my images in adobe's cloud system it's too expensive and it just doesn't work for me i need to carry around my data physically i have to have it in front of me so personally a exclusively cloud-based software does not work for me because i have too many images to work through and it just does not fit my workflow but if you're somebody that only shoots jpeg and you just don't shoot as much as me you don't have that many photos then honestly lightroom is probably fine the storage options available for you under adobe's creative cloud plans might be more than enough for you it really just depends on how many photos you're working with and whether it's raw or jpeg as well the second question you should ask yourself is how new are you to editing and also how seriously do you want to take editing like i said i think lightroom is a much more streamlined and easy to understand software in lightroom classic just has a slightly steeper learning curve but you also do get those few extra features that currently exist in lightroom classic that lightroom does not have so if you really aren't interested in like diving into the software and learning every little detail um lightroom is much easier for that and i do recommend that for beginner photographers but if you are a professional and you really want those more robust features and you want to be able to manipulate your photos heavily then i definitely recommend lightroom classic the next question is which devices do you edit on honestly this should have been the first question because if you don't edit on your desktop at all well then you shouldn't be using you can't be using lightroom classic because it's only desktop based but if you're somebody like me that likes to do both well then you can use both softwares you can still sync your images to the cloud using lightroom classic and then you can edit those images using lightroom on all of your other devices and this is the exact workflow that i use for my instagram photos what i do is import all of my photos into lightroom classic and then you can put them into a collection and then you can sync that collection to the cloud and then that collection will show up on all of your devices and this is awesome because i really do like editing on my mobile phone and if you guys have seen my video on the best mobile editing workflow for instagram i highly recommend checking that out that covers my entire editing workflow from importing the photos into lightroom classic sorting those images putting my favorites into a collection and then syncing that to the cloud and then editing on my mobile phone i really do like this workflow it works really well for me and i get the best of both worlds i can edit on my desktop using lightroom classic or i can edit on my phone using lightroom okay and the last consideration is pricing now pricing is going to vary depending on where you are in the world adobe does different pricing for different regions and stuff like that but in the us there's three main photography packages and in the first two packages there's one for 9.99 in 1999 and both of those will get you both lightroom and lightroom classic um the 999.1 gives you 20 gigabytes of data and the 1999 one gives you i think one terabyte of data and then there's also another package for 9.99 that's only lightroom and you get one terabyte of data so that's great if you're only going to be using lightroom and not lightroom classic honestly that's a great option for you because you get more storage for less money but yeah this isn't a huge consideration um personally the middle package works really well for me 19.99 a month i get both lightroom and lightroom classic and i also get one terabyte of storage which is more than enough for me because i only sync the photos that i'm actively editing so usually in the cloud i only have between 100 and 1500 photos depending on if i'm sorting and i want to see things on the road um it really just depends but usually never more than that now there's a few other small differences between lightroom and lightroom classic but they're honestly not that big of a deal the first one is tethering you can only tether in lightroom classic and this is for a more professional studio setup so it's not going to be relevant for most people the other one is printing printing locally through lightroom i don't personally use this i don't know many people who do and the last one is third party plugins lightroom classic supports more third-party plugins than lightroom however i think over time lightroom is going to have more third-party plugins and just a brighter feature overall so let's talk about that now i think lightroom is definitely the future of photo editing simply because it has that adobe sensei ai feature adobe is constantly improving this and i think honestly ai is the next generation of editing having that machine learning technology to evaluate our images and do smart editing features is honestly crazy i mean look at the things that are happening on our smartphones nowadays you can tap a filter in your face changes that is really really cool technology and that is slowly trickling down into photo editing so i'm really excited for the future of ai editing and i think that technology that exists in lightroom and its ability to be used on devices like smartphones and tablets really opens the door to so much more innovation than lightroom classic so i am keeping a close eye on lightroom and like i said i think it's the future and i think in time these softwares are either gonna merge or lightroom classic is gonna get this adobe sensei ai as well but for now lightroom classic is my main hub for editing i continue to use it to organize my images and i do edit on my phone as well using lightroom and like i said you can check out that video on my mobile editing workflow i'll leave a link in the description but that is it for this video guys before you head out i just want to shout out my adobe lightroom classic class um that class basically covers everything you need to know about lightroom classic and all the sliders and all the different features within it and it also provides some insight on how you can find and develop your own unique editing styles if you guys are interested in checking that out i'll leave a link in the description that course is hosted on skillshare so you can watch it free for 14 days and then after that it's like 15 a month and not only that under that same subscription you get access to all 16 of my other photography classes as well as the thousands of other classes on skillshare it's honestly a steal and i highly recommend checking that out if you want to become a better photographer but thanks for watching guys i will see you again very soon and i hope you have an awesome day [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sean Dalton

Views: 148,772

Keywords: Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Lightroom Classic, adobe lightroom vs lightroom classic, lightroom vs lightroom classic, lightroom vs lightroom mobile, lightroom vs lightroom classic vs lightroom cc, Adobe Lightroom Tutorial, Adobe Lightroom workflow, Adobe Lightroom workflow tutorial, Adobe Lightroom Classic tutorial, lightroom classic, lightroom mobile, photo editing, adobe creative cloud, photoshop lightroom, creative cloud, Sean Dalton, Photography tips, lightroom tutorial 2021

Id: BTvVs_CkkE4

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021