Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic : Which one is Better For You in 2024

Do you need clarification about making a selection from Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic and want to know which one is suitable for you according to your editing requirements? This confusion continues even after the selection because we’ve met too many professional photographers who are still scratching their heads about knowing the difference between Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. 

After having a look at the latest situations, we’ve decided to highlight the distinct features of Lightroom and Lightroom Classic through our lens of wisdom. Stay with us to get complete guidance about which editing tool is best for you according to your budget and video editing experience from Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic.

Adobe Lightroom Classic, as the name suggests, is a traditional desktop app developed on February 19, 2007. It stores our image files in the hard drive or external drive of the computer and is responsible for RAW editing. It offers different modules for every function, like organising, developing, and printing, and users can easily create slideshows, books, and web galleries.  In Adobe Lightroom Classic, users can edit their videos online or offline, but they can’t synchronise their editing work with mobile or tablet.

Lightroom or Lightroom CC ( CC stands for creative cloud) is a cloud-based editor that can automatically sync so users can switch to multiple devices like phones or tablets while performing their online editing. It has limited editing and image organisation features because of its simplified and less powerful interface as compared to Lightroom Classic. Moreover, users can easily manage their albums and folders with its AI-based keyword search tool.

In order to make your selection more accessible, we’re describing some of the unique features of Lightroom Classic so that you do not feel hesitation  while choosing it. These are the features that force us to select Lightroom Classic for performing the task of photo and video editing:

It offers different modules for performing various tasks, like creating books, slide shows, and printing. By using keyboard shortcuts, you can easily jump between these modules to apply settings. This enables you to edit photos and videos quickly, so if you’ve a considerable volume of work, Lightroom is the best option.

Suppose you’re an old user of Lightroom and have streamlined workflow ability on the old version due to its comprehensive and comfortable user interface. In that case, you’d go with Lightroom Classic. I’m also an old user of Lightroom and was forced by habit to use it because of its import dialog feature, which allows me to import presets and to rename files easily. Moreover, I can easily download, purchase, and export presets, which I like the most; that’s why sometimes I use it for bulk editing.

As it’s designed for desktop users and files are stored on the hard drive or local storage, you’ll not face any difficulty in importing or exporting the maximum number of files. You don’t need to pay for storage like in Lightroom CC. You can create maximum collections of edited photos and videos on your desktop by making folders and files separately for different images and videos. Another unique benefit is that you can access your data at any time without having an internet connection because of its local storage.

One of the most unique features of Lightroom Classic is its ability to integrate plugins developed by third-party developers, which makes it more extensible. These plugins offer numerous additional customization options for photo and video editing and a wide range of ready-made presets that are not available in the original Lightroom Classic. Some of the famous plugins that are mostly integrated with Lightroom Classic are given below:

There are certain advanced features of Lightroom CC that force us to use it. Let’s examine some of its features in detail:

Lightroom CC has a less powerful but simple and clean interface. That is why you can easily apply presets and can make standard adjustments like adjusting colour grade, brightness, contrast, vibrance, white balance, and more. In addition, with its unique touchscreen-friendly interface, we can quickly move sliders and can press buttons instead of controlling the mouse, trackpad, stylus, or fingers. Furthermore, if you want to remove the watermark, you can download the Lightroom Mod APK without a watermark from this website. 

Another fantastic feature of Lightroom CC that attracts us to this best video editing application is its sophisticated masking tool. We can hide any object from any photo or video by editing a mask or can change the background of any scene by replacing it with a mask and by giving that mask different colours. Those functions that are performed through third-party plugins in Lightroom Classic can easily be performed by a range of masks in Lightroom CC. 

Lightroom CC makes our learning curves as easy as possible by providing fairly advanced editing tools for enhancing colours, reducing noise, including exposures, etc. It also provides sliders for adjusting each effect. Due to its powerful editing tools and consumer-oriented design, we don’t feel the absence of integration of third-party plugins because we can adjust everything manually through these advanced-level editing tools.

If you’ve a huge collection of photos in Lightroom CC cloud storage, its image recognition and AI-based keyword search tool will help you to filter a particular image. AI-based object browsing and face recognition are two different features controlled by different algorithms, but they’ve a strong relationship and work together to browse different photos from a wide range of folders and albums.

Lightroom is synchronised to the cloud server, which means our images, metadata, and edits are automatically stored in cloud storage. It is accessible through different devices, such as computers, mobile devices, and tablets.Thus, we can easily access our images and videos through any device without manually sharing our files across different platforms.

Non-destructive image editing means that all editing work automatically saves in the cloud server even if we close Lightroom after half of the editing process. Suppose you’ve completed half of the editing process on your mobile, and then you can restart the next editing task on your computer that is synchronised with your mobile, and this shifting will not disturb your previous work. Moreover, you can separately use Lightroom for PC after knowing its installation and usage methods from our website.