Should I use Lightroom or Lightroom Classic? Key differences explained

what is up youtube hope you're doing really well welcome to my very first video for 2021 i did have a little bit of a break so it's nice to be back making videos if you did support my channel back in 2020 thanks so much for the support or if you're brand new here hey how's it going i'm tk north or tim northey and i'm a photographer from sydney australia so in this video i'm going to answer a big question that i get asked all the time and that's which version of lightroom is better so i'm going to go through the key differences between what we call lightroom and lightroom classic to avoid any confusion throughout this video i'm only going to use these names they have had previous names in the past and it can get a little bit confusing so just remember lightroom for the cloud-based version and lightroom classic which is more of your desktop version these are the names i'm going to be using throughout the video that's what they're called at the moment so remember lightroom and lightroom classic i would say straight off the bat that one is not actually superior to the other and one is not necessarily going to make you better at editing than the other they're just different programs that suit different needs and in terms of the sliders and the actual ability to manipulate your pictures the sliders are largely all the same with some tiny differences so your actual editing will pretty much be the same it's just which version is going to suit your own workflow better so that's what i'm going to go through in this video explain those key differences so then you can decide which one suits your workflow better so very quickly let's give a brief overview of how you can understand the differences so let's start with lightroom classic this is basically the og version of lightroom it's only available on desktop and all your files are stored locally and you have control of where you store them and you are also responsible for backing up those hard drives it has a few more features than the newer version of lightroom but because of this it can potentially be a little bit more confusing to brand new users to lightroom so that's lightroom classic compare that to the newer version of lightroom which is just lightroom this version is all cloud-based so all your original files are backed up and stored on the cloud this allows you to edit on pretty much any device because this application is available on mobile tablet and desktop and any edits you make will sync across all those different devices making it super useful to use on the go and it's also a little bit more streamlined and more intuitive which does make it probably a little bit easier to use if you're new to lightroom or photo editing in terms of the actual pricing for the individual apps there's not too much of a difference obviously this varies a little bit between country the actual prices so i'm not going to go into that in detail however because they are quite similar it really depends on the other factors which is going to be right for you anyway but one thing to consider when you're using lightroom or the cloud-based version is that you may eventually run out of cloud storage and there will be additional costs to purchase more storage remember if you do have the entire creative cloud suite you can use both but for anyone new to photo editing probably better to stick with one to start with just to get your head around it so which do i use and why well the answer it simply is both however it's probably about 90 percent lightroom classic because i like to use the mobile version here and there i am using lightroom as well it's really great for editing any photos you take on your phone it's really great for editing images on the go as well so i can transfer straight from my camera to the phone do a quick edit and upload onto stories but for me doing kind of large batch edits or editing something like a large wedding it just makes a lot more sense to do in lightroom classic and it's a lot easier plus the storage becomes an issue having to store all those photos on the cloud but which version is right for you so let's cover the first point which is probably the most important one and that's the storage of course with lightroom classic all your photos are stored locally that means you choose where to store them on your hard drive and you're also responsible for backing up those hard drives if one was to crash or fail so lightroom classic is definitely a better option if you have a large amount of files especially if they're raw files because you will run out of cloud storage quite quickly if you're using lightroom only there's also a limit to how much storage you can actually purchase for lightroom so at some point if you're taking a lot of photos no matter how cashed up you are you may actually run out of storage and have to go through and delete a lot of your photos the lightroom or the cloud version of course all your files are stored on the cloud that's original file size stored on the cloud so you don't have to worry too much about backing them up they're a little bit safer hopefully on the cloud then on a hard drive that means you don't have to take your hard drives with you and you don't have to worry about finding and plugging them in but keep in mind it's probably a better option only if you have a smaller amount of photos and you're not going to run out of storage in terms of storage you can largely decide by asking yourself these questions how many photos do you shoot a month if it's a lot lightroom classic may be a better option are you shooting raw or jpeg if you're only shooting jpeg perhaps lightroom is a better option if you have a large number of raw files you probably are going to run out of space pretty quickly and lastly are you good at backing up your files if you have a small amount of files and you're not very good at backing them up so you're better to go with lightroom where they're automatically backed up from the cloud so the next key thing to consider is basically the ease of use so this is a pretty simple one if you're brand new to photo editing lightroom is going to be a better option for you it is a little bit more streamlined a little bit more intuitive it has a few less options which means it probably is easier to follow and understand if you're brand new to photo editing that being said if you look at lightroom classic the advantage there is it does have a few more options to work with the other big advantage of lightroom is the fact that you can use it on pretty much any device from your mobile tablet desktop and they're going to sync across all of your devices lightroom classic is only available on desktop because of its extra features so depending if you want to edit on the go that can be another big deciding factor for you if you love to edit on the go you like to edit on your phone again lightroom is going to be the better option so a few more things to consider are you new to photo editing maybe lightroom's a better option do you see yourself needing more features if not now maybe you do down the tracks a lightroom classic might be worth learning to begin with do you want to be able to edit anywhere on any device again lightroom is the obvious choice there so the next big difference i wanted to go through is file organization and also importing now again lightroom classic in terms of importing your files is going to give you a lot more options and things you can do when importing implying metadata presets and all different things which you can't really do in lightroom so there's definitely more options there the other difference you notice with file organization and some of the other features is actually named slightly different between the two apps which can be a bit confusing as well so in lightroom classic you're using catalogues which is like your entire library of photos when you're importing photos it is called importing in lightroom classic and it's just called add photos in lightroom in lightroom classic you're using collections which can be sorted into collection sets and you can also use smart collections which are really handy as well these are called a little bit different in lightroom and again there's slightly less options i would say for me personally having a lot of photos as well as the storage factor it is a lot easier to organize them in lightroom classic maybe that's just because i'm used to it but it does give you a lot more options as well one extra advantage of lightroom here though is that it does have adobe sensei built in which is like their ai function because it's uploaded into the cloud adobe sensei can recognize certain things so you have this intuitive search function where if i search something like trees all my photos which show trees in them will actually show up and it recognizes this so this is really cool it will do this automatically and you can even do this for locations depending if you have metadata location on and this means if you took any photos say in japan they will come up when you search japan now lightroom classic of course does not have this feature you can add metadata tags but you have to do this all manually can be useful but of course manually it will take you a little bit of extra time so perhaps the most important thing for you is the actual ability to edit your photo now once you have both files sitting there in lightroom what's the difference in the actual tools that you can use to edit the photos well they're actually pretty similar when lightroom the cloud version first came out it was actually a lot more limited and it was missing a lot of the features that lightroom classic did have lightroom has actually got better and better and there's only a few kind of actual sliders when you're editing a photo that aren't on lightroom that you will find in lightroom classic for me personally the things that i really like using which aren't in lightroom are things like range masking which i go through in one of my other videos so you can check that out if you're unsure what that is basically you use this on your radial and graduated filters it allows you to apply that filter just to a particular part of the photo rather than the whole area in that filter so this is really handy and something you can't do on lightroom the other thing that's missing from lightroom is camera calibration and this is just another way you can manipulate color something that i use all the time however lightroom still has plenty of option to tweak and manipulate color so again you're not really missing out on much new addition to lightroom you can now create different versions of your photos which means you can apply different edits to the same photo similar to a way in virtual copies which you can do in lightroom classic for me this was a big advantage of lightroom classic but now you've got a similar option available in lightroom other things like photo merging or making a panorama image from several photos you can actually do this in lightroom i've heard a lot of people say but you can't make panoramas in lightroom but you actually can you just have to be on the desktop version of lightroom if you're on the mobile version of lightroom you won't be able to do that so last of all there is a couple of extra features which may be important to you that lightroom classic does offer which you won't find in lightroom that includes things like being able to tether your camera directly into lightroom classic things like local printing which you can also only do in lightroom classic also things like third-party plugins are far more available on lightroom classic has lots of options here for me i use lr time lapse all the time which requires a plug-in to process your time-lapse sequences which you can only use in lyrium classic so those are the main differences when it comes to lightroom and lightroom classic i hope this video has made it a little bit clearer which one you should be using if you do have any questions i'd love to hear from you down in the comments until next time i'm tk north happy editing i hope to see you here very soon bye for now [Music]

Channel: TKNORTH

Views: 95,771

Keywords: lightroom, lightroom classic, lightroom vs lightroom classic, which version of lightroom is the best, which lightroom should i use, adobe lightroom, lightroom tutorial, lightroom comparison, tknorth, tk north, best photo editing software, lightroom cc, lightroom editing, which lightroom should i buy, lightroom or lightroom classic

Id: mAUNJnstdQE

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021