The top editing program I use as a photographer

This post is for all photographers and those are you curious about being a photographer! Today I want to dig into why I use a certain program as my primary editing tool. Drumroll please…that program is Lightroom!

There are two kinds of Adobe Lightroom. There is just plain Lightroom which can also be called Lightroom CC or Lightroom Creative Cloud. This is the program I used all the way up until this year. It is very easy to navigate and you have the ability to manipulate photos on a more basic level than other programs. What I liked about this program is that it is attached to a cloud, so I would keep most of my photoshoots on the cloud (creative cloud) as I was paying for 1 terabyte (1 TB) of storage. I also liked the ability to create folders to organize my photos by client. I feel like this program is very clean too in the way it’s laid out.

Very recently however, I graduated from Lightroom CC to Lightroom Classic, which is a more advanced version of Lightroom CC. There are many many tools in here that can be used, and I am not even utilizing it fully. There are automatic adjustments that can be made like whitening someone’s teeth in a natural way with the click of a button. You can make clothes more vibrant along with many other pre-programmed adjustments.

One of the ways that Classic beats CC is with their brushes. This is different than Lightroom CC in that CC had brushes too, but they were clunky and less sophisticated. A brush is where you can use the mouse to gloss over a spot in the photo with your mouse like a brush, then choose an action to apply to that area, like maybe adjust the exposure to brighten that area, or maybe you want to apply some warmth. In classic there is a list of all the brushes you have used and you can easily click through them to keep the adjustments organized.

Another thing you can do in Classic is select just your subject or just your sky to adjust. There wasn’t a super seamless way to do that in CC, and in classic the tools you use to select are awesome. For instance if you are photographing outside and want to make the sky pop, you may underexpose the photo to keep the sky exposed properly, then select the subject in classic and bring up the exposure on the family or couple you are photographing.

I am going to be real with you, there are so many ways that Lightroom Classic is better, and I could easily write a 1500 word paper that just skims the surface as to why Classic is superior to CC, but let me leave you with this. As a photographer who used CC in the beginning, I have been able to edit photos in approx 2 hours for my clients so I can reveal their photos on the same day as their photoshoot. Classic has only made the process even easier and helps me to be even better at what I was already good at. It helped me to uplevel. So, listen to everybody telling you. Switch from CC to Classic, and if you haven’t used either, then start with Lightroom Classic. It’s easier to just start the program that you want to stick with!