How's Lightroom CC Doing?
There are a couple of interesting products to look at for the future of creative apps: The first is Figma, the first-ever web app to gain traction with creative professionals, another is Lightroom CC, Adobe’s newer alternative to Lightroom Classic. Lightroom Classic is the same application Adobe has been shipping since 2007, it has more powerful features1, in particular fine-grained control over how your image files are managed on disk. Lightroom CC is a newer alternative, and it’s the only version available on mobile. Lightroom CC has no control at all over your image files (“the era of the file is over”—Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe). Instead, all of your image files are synced to Adobe Creative Cloud. While it’s still behind Sketch, Figma has clearly been a resounding success with professionals. It’s harder to gauge how successful Lightroom CC has been, on one hand, it’s not marketed to professionals to begin with, but on the other, it’s hard to interpret Adobe’s choice of the word “Classic” in the name as anything other than an attempt to drive users to the newer app.
So how’s that going? Jenn Mishra recently wrote an article about sticking with Lightroom Classic for PetaPixel. Looking at the comments, this article received a hundred of them before the comment limit kicked in, and there’s only one comment that’s positive about Lightroom CC: It’s easy to find, it’s at the bottom, with the most downvotes.
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Incredibly, Lightroom CC does not include Lightroom Classic’s insanely useful History Panel, which seems like it should be one of the defining features of a non-destructive image editor. ↩︎