Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, often shortened to Lightroom, is an image organization and editing application developed by Adobe and licensed as part of the Creative Cloud suite. It is primarily geared towards photographers and provides tools to import, view, organize, tag, edit, and export large numbers of digital images. Lightroom is available on Windows, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android, and tvOS (Apple TV). The name Lightroom is a play on the darkrooms used for processing film.

Overview

Lightroom is offered in two versions. The first version, known as Lightroom Classic, stores files locally and has the most extensive set of features. The second version, known simply as Lightroom and formerly known as Lightroom CC, stores all uploaded photos and edits on Adobe's cloud servers and allows access through desktop, mobile, and a web browser. Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are two separate programs that store photos and settings separately, although Lightroom Classic supports limited syncing of photos and settings with Lightroom. Both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are non-destructive editing software that save edits as parametric instructions, separate from the original image. This allows the user to make changes to the image without any loss in quality and without modifying the original files, in contrast to raster graphics editors such as Photoshop, which save edits directly to the image. When images are exported, a copy of the image with the adjustments is created. Both versions can import photos from a camera or memory card, and allow for keywords, IPTC, XMP, and geolocation metadata to be added. Images can be filtered based on metadata, and organized into user-defined collections and albums. Lightroom and Lightroom Classic are compatible with TIFF, JPEG, PSD, PNG, CMYK (edited in RGB color space), raw image formats, and some video file formats.

Lightroom and Lightroom Classic provide tools specifically tailored to retouching (developing) photographs, including exposure compensation, white balance correction, color grading, tone curve, HSL, crop, distortion correction, vignette removal, sharpening, noise reduction, and red-eye removal. Both versions also offer simpler versions of tools found in Photoshop, such as cloning and healing, tone mapping, and panorama stitching. Layers are not supported, but masking can be used for localized adjustments. Develop settings can be applied as a batch to multiple photos, and saved as a preset for quick access. Presets are interchangeable between both versions of Lightroom and can be shared with other users. Lightroom and Lightroom Classic include several presets that can be used as starting-off points for editing. There is a large market for develop presets geared towards applying a pre-conditioned look. Both versions of Lightroom are closely integrated with Photoshop; users can make adjustments in Lightroom, export the photo into Photoshop for additional pixel-level editing, and then reimport the photo into Lightroom for finishing touches.

Lightroom Classic contains features not present in the cloud-based version of Lightroom, such as virtual copies, creating books and slideshows, proofing photos for print, creating HTML5 web galleries, and tethered shooting. Likewise, while both versions of Lightroom support basic video trimming, the cloud-based version of Lightroom allows for exposure adjustments, white balance, color grading, tone curve, and vignetting in video.

History

In 1999, veteran Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg began a new project, code-named ''Shadowland,'' a reference to the 1988 kd lang music album of the same name. Hamburg contacted Andrei Herasimchuk, former interface designer for the Adobe Creative Suite, to start the project. It was an intentional departure from many of Adobe's established conventions. Forty percent of Photoshop Lightroom is written in the scripting language Lua. In 2002, Hamburg left the Photoshop project and in fall of the same year he sent an experimental software sample named ''PixelToy'' to his former teammate Jeff Schewe for review; in 2003, Hamburg presented Schewe a first version of Shadowland in a very early UI version. After research by Hamburg, Herasimchuk, Sandy Alves (the former interface designer on the Photoshop team), and Grace Kim (a product researcher at Adobe), the Shadowland project accelerated around 2004. Herasimchuk chose to leave Adobe Systems at that time to start a Silicon Valley design company. Hamburg then chose Phil Clevenger, a former associate of Kai Krause, to design a new look for the application.

Lightroom's developers work mostly in Minnesota, comprising the team that had already created the program Adobe ImageReady. Troy Gaul, Melissa Gaul, and the rest of their crew (reportedly known as the "Minnesota Phats"), with Hamburg, developed the architecture behind the application. George Jardine was the product manager.

Beta development

On January 9, 2006, an early version of Lightroom was released to the public as a Macintosh-only public beta, on the Adobe Labs website. This was the first Adobe product released to the general public for feedback during its development. This method was later used in developing Adobe Photoshop CS3.

On June 26, 2006, Adobe announced that it had acquired the technology of Pixmantec, developers of the Rawshooter image processing software.

On January 29, 2007, Adobe announced that Lightroom would ship on February 19, 2007, priced at $299 US, £199 UK.

Further beta releases followed. Notable releases included ''Beta 3'' on July 18, 2006, which added support for Microsoft Windows systems. On September 25, 2006, ''Beta 4'' was released, which merged Lightroom into the Photoshop product range, followed by a minor update on October 19, which was released as ''Beta 4.1''.

Creative Cloud

On April 8, 2014, Adobe released a mobile version of Lightroom for iPad, available with a Creative Cloud subscription. On January 15, 2015, Adobe released an Android version alongside Lightroom web, which allowed cloud-based photos to be accessed and edited through a web browser. Photos and edits are saved to the cloud and synced between devices.

On October 18, 2017, Adobe released Lightroom CC as the desktop counterpart to Lightroom for mobile; the older version of Lightroom was subsequently renamed to Lightroom Classic CC. Lightroom CC is a separate application and can be installed alongside Lightroom Classic CC. Lightroom CC can be synced with Lightroom for mobile, with photos and edits available between desktops and mobile devices. Lightroom 6 was the last version of Lightroom that could be obtained with a perpetual license, and received its last update on December 19, 2017. All subsequent versions of Lightroom are only available through an ongoing Creative Cloud subscription. If the subscription is cancelled, Lightroom CC will retain user data for one year, while Lightroom Classic CC can continue to be used indefinitely to organize and export, but not develop, images.

In 2019, Lightroom Classic CC was renamed to Lightroom Classic, and Lightroom CC was renamed to simply Lightroom.

Apple TV

On July 26, 2016, Adobe launched Lightroom on Apple TV, a means of displaying photographs on a large screen using Apple's network appliance and entertainment device.

Samsung Galaxy

In 2023, Adobe announced that the Expert RAW app on the Samsung Galaxy S23 series would integrate Adobe Lightroom.

See also

* Comparison of raster graphics editors

References

Works cited

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External links

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Current versions

Talk given by Troy Gaul
Adobe's lead Lightroom programmer in 2009 at the C4 conference, covering Lightroom's history, code and architecture up to version 2.0

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Lightroom
Proprietary photo software
Proprietary image organizers
Proprietary raster graphics editors
Lua (programming language) software
2007 software
Raw image processing software
Proprietary cross-platform software
proprietary software for Windows
proprietary software for macOS