LIGHTROOM CLASSIC AND LIGHTROOM

In a repeat of the well-known saga of a famous soft drink company's naming confusion, Adobe introduced a new product that took the name of an established one and gave the latter a new name. If you found that confusing, then you are not alone!

- Ashok Kandimalla

Adobe’s Lightroom is a very successful software package that combines several photo-centric modules into one highly functional integrated package that covers most needs of any photographer. Later, Adobe introduced another software but strangely called it Lightroom and to distinguish it from the existing Lightroom, renamed the earlier one as Lightroom Classic! Both these are a part of Adobe’s suite of products under the broad name Creative Cloud or CC for short.

To summarise, the older Lightroom is now called the Lightroom Classic, and the new Lightroom is named, well, just Lightroom! Whether this makes sense or not we do not know, but that is how it is! To shorten the names and make reading easier, we will call these LrC (Lightroom Classic) and Lr (Lightroom) respectively. Before we go any further, we will be using the words “image library” often. This is simply the sum of all your stored images put together. It exists once you have some stored mages, even if you do not use any software for managing or processing them. Let us see how these apps from the same stable differ as well as resemble with one another.

Architecture

As there are major differences in the architecture of both these, let us look at this aspect in detail.

LrC though by name implies a single application. it is a unification of several sub-apps called modules (Picture 1), each performing a different function. Briefly, here is a list of them along with their functions.

• Library Manager is a Digital Asset Manager (DAM), and its function is to help organise your image library and retrieve images based on several search parameters that can be based on the metadata or other attributes (added by the user).