CONS of Adobe Lightroom Classic

• Initial raw conversion is slightly more detailed in some competing products
• Requires subscription

Adobe Lightroom Classic

The Adobe Lightroom Classic group includes Adobe Color, Monochrome, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait, Standard, and Vivid. Adobe Color is the default for newly imported photos.

It gets a bit more contrast, warmth, and vividness out of the photo than Adobe Standard, which is the same as the previous version of Lightroom. You can thankfully now turn on lens-profile corrections for everything you import, rather than making you go down and turn them on for every photo after importing.

For several of my test shots, particularly of color portraits and landscapes, I now find Lightroom Classic’s initial rendering as satisfactory as Capture One’s, though I prefer the less juiced-up Portrait profile for many photos rather than the default Color profile, which I find oversaturated.

Any photos you’ve already imported will retain the legacy Adobe Standard Profile, so you may want to go back and switch that to Adobe Color or one of the others if you’re working on an older shot.

Camera Matching Profiles

Camera Matching Profiles are based on your camera manufacturer’s image rendering. As you might surmise, they’re designed to match what you see on your camera LCD or the JPG the camera produces. I found them less effective than Adobe’s Profiles. In test portraits shot on a Canon EOS 1Ds some were too cool, and others were oversaturated.

The Monochrome Profile is a better option than starting with a color Profile and then converting to black-and-white. That’s because it starts from the raw camera image. Portrait is supposed to reproduce all skin tones accurately, and Landscape adds a lot more vibrancy, since there are no face tones to worry about distorting.

Neutral has the least contrast, useful for difficult lighting situations, and Vivid punches up saturation and contrast.

The Creative Profiles may remind many people of Instagram filters. I’m disappointed that they have names like Artistic 01, Modern 04, and so on. I’d prefer names that give you a sense of what the effect does. Despite that quibble, the Creative Profiles really do add moods, usually without being overdone. In some cases, they produce a one-step improvement. The 17 B&W choices are remarkably varied, too.

Enhance Details and Super Resolution

Another relatively new tool for raw camera files is Enhance Details, which is available in both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom. The feature is intended to clarify complex parts of an image. It’s a very subtle effect, and for many photos, it doesn’t do a whole lot, especially for parts of the photo that have a consistent texture, such as the sky.

You access the feature from the Photo menu (or from a right-click menu), and then it shows you a dialog with a detailed view of your shot. Running it creates a new DNG file. It’s a very compute-intensive operation, and even crashed my system on one occasion.

For some shots, the difference wasn’t noticeable at all, and on others it was only noticeable at 2:1 magnification. I did see more detail in a shot of wet pavement, and it could certainly make a meaningful difference in a large print. However, it doesn’t feel close to a 30% improvement in detail. In the following shot, the gravel on the right side looks more gravelly:

In the shot below, the medallion shows more detail to my eyes (though not to those of some of my coworkers). Still, I’m not convinced that it has 30% more detail. PCMag’s camera analyst Jim Fisher tried the feature in the macOS version on his 5K iMac and found similarly minimal changes to the images.

A newer, related feature is Super Resolution, which you can apply to the selected photo from the Photo > Enhance menu item or by right-clicking and choosing Enhance. The tool works with JPGs rather than raw files and is intended to improve old, low-megapixel images. In my view, its AI edits give photos an artificial look, though it does smooth out pixelation.

Photo Adjustment

In the Develop mode, sliders for adjustments like Exposure, Contrast, and Blacks all sit right in the middle of their tracks at zero, letting you slide them up and down. Having everything set to a 0 baseline and slider motion up to 100 and down to -100 makes good sense.

It’s possible to adjust multiple photos at once, by selecting them on the filmstrip along the bottom and tapping the Auto Sync button. You can be very specific about which adjustments you want to synchronize. The button always shows when auto-syncing is enabled. A tooltip now displays the number of images the develop settings will be applied to.

Adobe claims that the Auto Settings button, tucked next to the Tone group of controls, has been sped up, but it’s still far from instant. There’s also an Auto button in Library mode’s Quick Develop panel that does the same thing. I’m seldom thrilled with its results, though it is effective on photos with very poor lighting. I find that it often results in overly bright, contrast-y images.

The program’s shadow and highlight recovery tools let you bring out a dark face without blowing out the bright sky in an image, for example. You can also do this with an adjustment brush, but the effect is more natural when applied with Adobe Lightroom Classic and Shadows sliders. Most photo apps these days, however, include shadow adjustment, even the free Microsoft Photos and Apple Photos. A basic behavior of all the lighting sliders is that moving them to the left always darkens the image, to the right brightens. Other programs have less consistent controls.

Conclusion

Adobe Lightroom Classic v13.5.1 remains the gold standard in pro photo workflow software. It’s a complete package, with top-notch organization tools, state-of-the-art adjustments, and all the output and printing options you could want.