CONS

• Expensive
• Limited sharing
• Can’t choose which photos to sync
• No local printing
• No plug-in support

The Lightroom Interface

Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor Mod Apk sports a refreshing, clean interface. It features what Adobe product director Tom Hogarty calls “progressive disclosure,” meaning it starts oimple and then reveals increasingly complex tools as you need them.

The interface now has four buttons along the left rail: A plus sign for adding photos, Home, My Photos, and Sharing. The Home screen shows new tutorials along with a row of your photo’s thumbnails. You’ll spend the most time in My Photos, where you select and edit images. You can switch to a contact-sheet view and sort by import date, capture date, or modified date.

With this radical rethinking of Lightroom, Adobe ditches the modes of its predecessor: Library, Develop, and the rest. Aside from the rows of your synced photos, the interface is notably sparse. Organization and adjustment tools are hidden behind the box and control slider icons at the left and right edges, respectively.

The organization panel and adjustment panel don’t show at the same time. By default, when you open one, the other closes. Thankfully, you can change this behaviour in Preferences by switching the panels from Automatic to Manual.

In My Photos, double-clicking on a thumbnail in the tile view opens a photo in full view, and double-tapping again takes you back to the gallery view, just as in Lightroom Classic. Tapping the full photo view (the cursor appears as a plus sign) enlarges the image to 100 per cent. Afterwards, the cursor changes to a hand, letting you drag the image around.

At the bottom right, there are also Fit, Fill, and 1:1 choices. There’s a Show Original button, but no side-by-side before-and-after view such as you get in Lightroom Classic. You can use the mouse wheel while holding down Ctrl to zoom in and out, but this only stops at major points like the fit, fill, and 1:1; you don’t get a zoom slider showing you the per cent, as you do in CyberLink PhotoDirector.

A somewhat new feature is the ability to create edit versions, so you can compare two or more edit processes. You simply tap the Versions option at the bottom-right of the adjustments panel, and a Versions panel pops out to the left of the adjustments, giving easy access to your multiple versions. One thing to note is that you can’t edit a version; once you create it, its adjustments are fixed, though you can continue editing with your edits in place for another version, and you can, as always, use Ctrl-C to copy-edit settings from the version.

As for touch input, Lightroom is adequate. You can easily use its buttons and controls via touch, and you can tap or unpinch a photo to zoom it to the last level. Lightroom Classic (as well as Photoshop) features a full touch mode for tablets and touch-screen PCs such as the Surface Book.

Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor Mod Apk includes a boatload of help and tutorial content. Click the question mark at the top right to get started. You get animated visual help on all the individual adjustments, along with wizards that use sample images from noted photographers to show exactly how they edit an image.

It even shows their adjustment slider settings. The help is context-sensitive. For example, for an outdoor portrait, it aptly proposes the tutorial called Enhance Natural Light Portraits by Improving Contrast and Color. I welcome having this guidance built right into the app. By contrast, all of Lightroom Classic’s help is web-based.

For users who aren’t old hands at image correction and enhancement, the program’s animated sample editing steps can be of great assistance in getting them started on a photo editing journey. The edit guides show the effect of each adjustment in sequence. Of course, nothing is stopping you from simply messing with the sliders to get a look that suits your taste. Still, not everyone needs to reinvent every wheel.

Importing Images

Neither Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor Mod Apk nor Classic pops up as an Auto-Play option when you insert an SD memory card. I like to have a big Import button always handy, but with the new Lightroom, you have to press the + button and then choose the source folder or card.

When you import pictures from a camera card, you see a grid of all the card’s images. Unlike previous versions of Lightroom, this iteration doesn’t let you view a photo at full size before importing it.

When you import, all the images are automatically backed up to Adobe’s servers. Hands-off people will probably appreciate this, but I’d prefer more control over what’s uploaded.

You can pause uploading, but you can’t specify folders and files you don’t want to be uploaded. For the ability to exclude images from uploading to the cloud, look to Lightroom Classic. Also look there (or even to the Windows Photos app) for automatic importing from folders you specify.

The import process has long been one of the pain points of Lightroom. Many have complained on photo forums and blogs about how slow it is.

I pate wasting upload time and storage space with images I may not want to save. Professionals with loads of RAID storage probably want everything imported, but they also want it to happen fast. To be fair, importing is now faster in Lightroom (and also in the recently updated Lightroom Classic).

At import, you can choose to add images to a specified album and choose a default raw import setting. This option lets you choose not only a standard raw import option, such as Adobe Color, but alternatively an effect-like default such as the Vintage Instant Creative. You can use a custom preset you created yourself as a default at import, as well.

I tested import performance with 190 raw files from a Canon 80D to my Windows 10 PC with 16GB DDR4 RAM, a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-6700 CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 745 discrete graphics card. Lightroom took 5:04 for the import, which was on the high end for the field.

For comparison, Skylum Luminar took 5:03. Lightroom Classic took 3:51, Capture One took 4:55, and Zoner Photo Studio took 4:54. Note that the Lightroom (non-Classic) import time doesn’t include completing uploading the images to the cloud, just importing into the local application.

Raw Profiles

If you want to get the most editing potential out of your digital camera, you’ll import raw camera files. When you import raw files, the software translates raw data from the camera sensor into a viewable image, using a rendering Profile.

The Profile option already existed in Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor Mod Apk and Camera Raw, but it was way down in the Camera Calibration section and only offered a few basic choices, most of which were based on your camera manufacturer’s software.

Now they’re at the top of the Edit adjustment panel, and they’re more reflective of Adobe colour technology than that of the camera maker. It’s important because it’s the starting point for any other editing you do, so it makes sense to put the option at the top.

In my recent pro photo software reviews, I’ve mentioned that Capture One has done a superior job of initial raw conversion—that pictures look better right after you import them and before you make adjustments. Phase One’s software brought out more detail and colour than Adobe’s blander Standard Profile. The Profiles in Lightroom go a long way towards rectifying this.

The Profiles come in two main groups: raw and creative. Choices in the first group are Adobe Raw and Camera Matching, while Creative options include Legacy, Artistic, B&W, Modern, and Vintage. The raw Profiles only work with raw images, while the last four are special effects that also work with JPG images.

The Browse option shows square thumbnails of each profile, which you can hover over with the mouse to preview the main image window. You can also choose Favorite Profiles to appear in the top group of thumbnails.

Included in the Adobe Raw group are Adobe Color, Monochrome, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait, Standard, and Vivid. I expect Adobe Color to be the most popular, and it’s 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.

For some test shots, particularly in colour portraits, I now prefer Lightroom’s initial rendering to Capture One’s, especially when using the Portrait and Landscape Profiles appropriately. Note that any photos you’ve already imported will retain the legacy Adobe Standard Profile, which usually yields a less pleasing result than the newer Profiles.

The Camera Matching Profiles simply mimic the camera manufacturer’s image rendering. They’re designed to match what you see on your camera LCD or the JPG the camera produces. I find the latter less pleasing than Adobe Profiles. They were either too cool or oversaturated for a Canon 1Ds portrait.

Conclusion

Adobe Lightroom Photo Editor v9.1.1 Mod Apk targets photography enthusiasts with this newer version of its Lightroom professional photo workflow program. Slick and nimble, it now boasts most of Lightroom Classic’s photo-editing tools, but still lacks some workflow features, local printing, and plug-in support.