At its Adobe MAX conference, Adobe announced a big shake-up for its Lightroom photo processing application. The current Lightroom CC is being renamed to Lightroom Classic CC, and a new product with an old name, Lightroom CC, will take its place.
The new Lightroom CC offers most of the photo processing features of Lightroom Classic but with some key differences. The interface is simpler, and it's shared between both the desktop versions (for Mac and PC), the mobile versions for Android and iOS, the Apple TV version, and Lightroom CC for the Web. It offers both a common look and feel and common capabilities across the range of platforms.
That cross-platform consistency ties in strongly with its other, likely contentious feature: it uploads all your photos to cloud storage. A $9.99-a-month Lightroom CC subscription—just as is already the case with Classic, the software is only offered on a subscription basis—comes with 1TB of cloud storage, with additional space available in 1, 5, and 10TB increments.
This means that your full library is available regardless of the amount of local storage, something particularly desirable on phones and laptops. It also means that you have an off-site backup of sorts. But it also means that you'll be uploading a ton of data to the Internet, with no ability to opt out.
Finally, Adobe is using that cloud storage to perform object detection on your pictures. This means you can search for keywords without having to manually tag your pictures, at least assuming that the object detection has figured out exactly what you photographed.
The new Lightroom CC also largely integrates the features found in Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe's software for converting and linearizing RAW data from digital cameras.
While Adobe says that the new software contains almost all of the features of the old, it currently lacks support for plugins, and it doesn't support the creation of multiple catalogs.
As is the case for most Adobe software, Lightroom CC is also available in a bundled subscription. For $9.99 a month, you get Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC, Photoshop CC, and 20GB of cloud storage; for $19.99 a month, that goes up to 1TB.
Also at MAX, Adobe launched a trio of apps that have until now been in beta. Last year at MAX, Adobe showed XD, a design tool for mobile apps and websites, and Project Felix, a design app for creating composite images that combined 2D images and 3D renders. Both launch today, with Flex having an official branding of Adobe Dimension CC. Character Animator CC, an app for creating 2D animations based on still images created in Photoshop and Illustrator, also goes live today.
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