Lightroom Photo & Video Editor Reviews

by Excellent714

Just like Photoshop on my computers Adobe has its own peculiar ways of doing the most simple tasks. After using Photoshop for 20 years you’d expect to have little difficulty with the Lightroom App. When you use most programs - even an OS - there is no so-called learning curve. But with Adobe you are bound to be surprised when you realize how difficult they make it to do the very simplest of things. Adobe makes things difficult to show you how fancy or scientific it is. I just opened Lightroom and am finding there is no way to get pictures out of it once Adobe captures them. I can delete an album of Adobe’s choice but not one stinking picture of my choice. It doesn’t even have to be deleted just removed from Lightroom. There are so many apps that do the same things easier and better it’s hard to justify Lightroom. On my computers I’ve always had Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Since Photoshop costs ten times more you’d expect it to be the best choice. Not unless you prefer doing everything the hard way. Paint Shop Pro is not perfect but I can do everything Photoshop does in a fraction of the time. I’m not even sure why Lightroom exists. And when it comes to iPhone there are so very many apps that are easier and give better results. The Bottom Line is avoid anything Adobe like the plague.

by Aliona.Sil

I was very excited for LightroomPhotoVideoEditor and been successfully using it for a few months now. My husband and I went to Aruba for our honeymoon and LightroomPhotoVideoEditor helped make our pictures absolutely magical and beautiful and all was well until today when I decided to upgrade to premium account to have access to more cool features. Once I upgraded I jumped back in one of the photos to edit it as LightroomPhotoVideoEditor crashed all of a sudden. When I got back into LightroomPhotoVideoEditor I found all of my albums and pictures that I spent hours and hours working on were gone. I thought it must have been a mistake because there were no warnings or signs that something like that would happen. So I went online in hopes to find an answer and to my disappointment I found an Adobe Lightroom forum where other people posted the same issue. Apparently lots of people had the same issue and said that customer support was no help at al. This is absolutely unacceptable and terrible user experience. I will pursue to escalate this to make sure other people don’t fall into the same trap, but for now beware that if you upgrade and decide to spend your hard earned money on LightroomPhotoVideoEditor it will silently and irreversibly erase all your old photos and presets.

by Suddenly The Worst App Ever

Wow. This is the first review I have ever written anywhere, on any site, and it’s warranted because the most recent LR update is beyond awful. It shows that LightroomPhotoVideoEditor creators have literally no idea how their app is being used. The ability to share the photo directly from the photo into Lightroom is gone. Why would you remove that feature? Now, you have to manually import the photo which is cumbersome and requires several extra clicks. Worse, all of my personal presets have been moved into a buried folder that requires several clicks to get to, and the presets themselves look totally different, as if they are not compatible with the new version of LightroomPhotoVideoEditor . Overall, I cannot think of a worse redesign for what was truly a great app. I would love to hear from other reviewers about any other photo editing apps out there that can serve the same purpose, as I can’t imagine continuing to use LightroomPhotoVideoEditor with these new changes. The creators of LightroomPhotoVideoEditor should strongly consider keeping the bug fixes and reverting to the old version of LightroomPhotoVideoEditor while figuring out a way to fix this awful mess they have made.

by KBYogi007

For some reason, and twice in one week when I’ve gone in to edit some photos with presets I’ve downloaded (some of which I have had for years), they are wiped clear and the only thing available is the standard presets that have come with the apps. I sent an email for support and never heard back the first time. I bought a new set of presets I was looking at and when I downloaded those the rest magically appeared? I was worried it would happen again. Which last night it did. I had edited probably 2 or 3 photos and then I went to do another, and... gone, all presets gone including the new ones I bought. I tried updating LightroomPhotoVideoEditor , but no updates were needed or available. I tried deleting g LightroomPhotoVideoEditor , which I was hesitant to do, but desperate as I didn’t want to have to buy more presets. So I had to painfully go through my emails and find every purchase I made of presets from various providers and painstakingly download and create each preset. I have quite a few so this took me some time. Really frustrated by this recent experience. I would have rated it 5 Stars prior to this issue.

by Ryan C Thompson

I love LightroomPhotoVideoEditor for the editing purposes, no issues there, but the camera in app is extremely frustrating. I have an iPhone X and I like that LR offers a camera for shooting raw and is my go to camera. However, the exposure is way off most of the time. It does not have issues when shooting JPG, but when shooting raw it totally overexposes, And I’m only using it for the raw capabilities. And I mean by a lot, blowing out photos entirely. It looks fine on the screen during the preview but the result is unusable. I frequently have to take the exposure compensation down to around -2.7 to get a useable result. And there is no way for me to know based on the preview if it will be correct or not. It also shows a snapshot of the photo I took immediately after the shutter with the expected result of what I think I took, only to find the file is completely overexposed in the library and often with some wild color issues even after I’ve used a custom white balance and grey card. Please fix.

by Pattywap33

LightroomPhotoVideoEditor would be absolutely perfect if it didn’t take away the HDR peak brightness on iPhone photos. When I take a photo on my iPhone and view it in the apple photos app, the HDR parts of the photos POP with the full brightness available on my iPhone 13 Pro Max. However, when I load the photo into Lightroom it takes away the peak brightness in the areas where the HDR comes into play. I’ve tried changing every possible setting and I’ve gotten ahold of customer support and all they made me do was delete and re-download LightroomPhotoVideoEditor (this did not work, and the CSR had no other ideas to help me out). To see what I mean, take a photo on an iPhone, upload it to Lightroom, and re-download it to your camera roll without making any edits or changes. When you toggle back and forth between the original and the Lightroom version you can tell a huge difference in peak brightness. It sort of ruins the experience for me and I find myself using the standard photos app to enhance my pictures because it retains the HDR peaks, unlike Lightroom. I believe that a software update to allow Lightroom to recognize and retain the peak brightness from iPhone photos would solve this issue. Other than this, LightroomPhotoVideoEditor is amazing.

by Agegirl

Hello, I know I probably won’t get a response but it’s worth a shot. I have downloaded more photo editing apps than you can imagine. I have tried so hard to figure this issue out and I can’t for the life of me. So I’m really desperate at this point. Can you please tell me how to resize an image without compromising the photo? Lightroom gives you some aspect ratio presets. But, it doesn’t matter what I choose because it always cuts off my photo. I don’t want to do that. I want to be able to fit in the FULL size photo. If it means I could crop it into being a full sized photo, I would be willing to loose on the quality. And, I don’t want to put it on a white background so that the photo fits in that square because I would still be loosing on the photo. I want to be able to resize to whatever dimension I need to in order to fit the photo in different social media platforms. I know that a lot of these platforms automatically compress the photo for you but, I would like to resize it before I upload so I don’t compromise the photo, and it doesn’t get cut off. I have watch many videos yet, I can never get it. I would greatly appreciate it if someone could suggest what I can do to fix this frustrating problem. I would be so grateful!!

by Anasatya

I absolutely adore this photo app and have been using it for years! but since one of the latest updates, you can no longer DELETE an individual image. Now you have to selects images from your entire gallery and delete the selected ones but you CANNOT open an individual image as before and delete it. On the help guides says to “open image-click Edit-delete image” the problem is that when you open the image and click on edit there is NO delete image option. How to delete an individual image NOT from the photo gallery but the image itself? WHY you removed this option?

When you take 15 images of a ring let’s say, you want to see them individually to get a closer look and then delete an image if you don’t like. Now? You can see individual images but you have to go back to the gallery and from there select the ones you want to delete. Problem is that 15 almost identical images in gallery size doesn’t allow you to know anymore which one is the one you wanted to delete. Not having this option any more is time consuming and frustrating the least to say.

Please make this feature available again. 🙏🏼

by TrueReviewer02

I think LightroomPhotoVideoEditor is great. Even if you don't have the cash for the Creative Cloud. If you want to just do some photo editing or add metadata and watermarks, LightroomPhotoVideoEditor is on top!
Unfortunately, even though LightroomPhotoVideoEditor offers cloud storage with the CC, its still the largest app on my phone. A quick search on the internet tells me I'm not alone.
I think a great update for LightroomPhotoVideoEditor would be smaller res photos on the device. Yeah, LightroomPhotoVideoEditor has smaller res pictures already, but I mean Really small res. Let me explain:
I don't do much photo editing (I prefer to get it right when I open the shutter in the first place), so the smaller "smart previews" aren't what I need. I use Lightroom to organize my pictures, occasionally I'll break out the editing, but its rare. What I need from Lightroom is the ability to import my photos to the cloud, add metadata, and export them at a smaller resolution with a watermark.
I have the Apple Photos app store my pictures in iCloud, and my Photos app has a smaller GB footprint than Lightroom. But Lightroom has megabytes of data stored in its cloud, while Photos has Gigabytes! And Lightroom is still larger on my device! Why is that?
If this is a bug, please fix it. If its just a difference in resolution between the Lightroom device copies and the Photos copies, please add a function to save "lower res images" (EVEN LOWER THAN SMART PREVIEWS) to my device.

by RobAbroad

So, the good...the editing seems solid.
The bad...some basic features seem to be missing. The main thing I really feel they need to add to the iOS version is the ability to edit or manage multiple photos as once. There is no way to tag or rate multiple images. I have dozens from the same location and it’s going to be soooo tedious tagging them. I also wish it had at least basic geotagging capabilities. I geotag my photos as part of my workflow when I import the RAW files onto the iPad. But, I can’t actually see that info inside LR. Probably not a huge deal because I can just retag inside of iOS Photos app should I choose.
I noticed in various forums that users have been asking for some of these features for a while. Anyway, I’ll probably discontinue my subscription after I finish this trip and have all my editing done.

by Icantevenhavemyname

I really don’t know what to do anymore. After spending a month giving up remote access to my laptop so Adobe could(and I’m grateful) find some phantom sync errors that refused to go away and fixing them with customer scripts, the same issue on mobile still persists. The only way to make it disappear is to delete LightroomPhotoVideoEditor and start all over. Again. And again. I’m so sick of this.

I’ve upgraded to an iPhone 11, am on iOS 14.7.1, had no sync errors this morning, and have only uploaded files through the Lightroom CC app on my Windows 10 laptop(which shows nothing pending). The browser site also shows no sync errors, but away my phone app spins. Again.

I only want one thing from a user perspective, Adobe. For the love of God let the darn mobile app show WHICH PHOTO is stuck. I’m sure that’s harder than I’m making it, but this is absurd after over 8 months of this. I just want my stuff to work like it did before y’all “updated” everything. Please.

by Ssb540

I use LightroomPhotoVideoEditor professional for 90% of my editing work! It has most of the functions I use on my desktop using Lightroom Classic. I’m sure one day through updates it will receive all of Lightroom Classic’s functionality. My guess is this will be after Apple makes the switch to all in house processors when Intel and NVIDIA is phased out.
My one big complaint, which is probably not a big deal to most people, is when I make ANY EDIT, it can be marking a photo, making an adjustment, rating a photo, etc.., a notification pops up in the middle of my screen, covering my image, to tell me what adjustment I made. Even with overlays turned off in settings this little notification pops up for a couple seconds on each photo. When editing 4,000+ photos every week this adds up to a LOT of wasted time waiting for that little notification to go away so I can see my photo.
Adobe, if you read this, PLEASE add an option under settings to hide ALL overlays and notifications.
Thanks!

by Tracemeek

As a semi-pro photographer, I have found that Lightroom helps me improve the quality of my photos better than any other iOS app, except for perhaps Darkroom. Lightroom’s editing tools and ability to create and sync presets are the best, and in my opinion, worth the monthly cost of a monthly PS/LR subscription.

My one wish is that LR would be engineered to work as an “extension” to the iCloud Photo Library (on desktop too). I don’t want to maintain two separate photo libraries, and the LR library doesn’t offer anything more compelling than iCloud’s.

The iCloud Photo Library’s organization features, its support of RAW files, and the convenience of getting photos into it (a quick swipe from my iPhone’s lock screen) mean that I’m not going to give it up any time soon. Skate to where the puck is going, Adobe! (Please and thank you!)

by Joann Nguyen

When Lightroom CC came out, it showed amazing improvements from the classic version, and I absolutely love it. I love how it can create public albums and can instantly share to my phone, and don’t get me started on the user interface. However, I’ve had some issues. On the mobile app, when you allow it to access your photos, it will upload every photo from your phone, but when you remove the access, you can’t download the photos from LightroomPhotoVideoEditor ; and you only have between the two choices. Also, I really don’t like how on the public albums, there aren’t very many settings, so when I want to show my friends my albums, they aren’t able to download the photos. I used to prefer LightroomPhotoVideoEditor over Flickr for sharing images, but it’s become a hassle because my friends aren’t able to download my photos. Anyways, pretty good app but it needs some improvements.

by Aaauia1

Ok LightroomPhotoVideoEditor is hands-down the best editing app in my opinion but what I don’t like is the fact they changed the option to have all your edited photos synced across all devices for free but you have to get the subscription. I personally think that this is unfair because these are my photos and plus why should I have to pay just to have my photos that I took for free. So Lightroom, I ask that you please let all users have that option of being able to sync their photos on all devices again. Also, if possible, could you create an option where the photos that are edited have an Instagram accustomed setting because it’s really annoying having Instagram change the quality of the picture horribly because the pixels are too high.

by HelloitsDerek

With 1-terabyte of storage it's practically unlimited; no need to worry about space ever again. The edit tools are similar to iOS photos, but on steroids. Flag photos: accept/reject/no flag plus a five star rating system. Organize your photos with folders and albums. Tag photos with as many keywords as you want. Easily search and display photos by any of these features. I also love that I can use it on my Mac and iPad too. Plus you get Bridge for your Mac which expands your editing feature list even more. If the monthly fee has you down, just pretend your taking one of the dev team members out for a coffee every month. Well worth it, LightroomPhotoVideoEditor is super amazing and works very well! You can tell it's designed by a team of talented people and not just one guy in his basement. Don't hesitate, get it today, you love it... I guarantee it!!

by Krizzle711.........711

I love using LightroomPhotoVideoEditor. There are so many great features. But when you’re using presets, ones you’ve created or downloaded, you can’t tell what filter is on the photo. I have a lot of presets saved and if I’m editing a bunch of photos I’ll have to go through every single preset to see which is the one that I had originally selected. And it will also take off any other editing I’ve done. So that’s just a little frustrating. And also without going through and editing every minor detail I wish there would be a way to decrease the intensity of a preset.
But other than that I’ve enjoyed using LightroomPhotoVideoEditor . Friends will ask what I use to edit and I gladly tell & show them. LightroomPhotoVideoEditor has a lot of tools that can help create amazing pictures ◡̈

by Bobskie Boo

I am so obsessed with Lightroom! I do photography as a hobby and I’m an amateur, so I love learning how to edit my photos in post. I gotta say, the curve tool is such a game changer and a necessity. If used correctly, it can literally change the entire look and vibe of your photos. I have played around with it so much that a lot of my photos look like I used filters from other popular apps. I have stopped using filters COMPLETELY and learning on creating my own style of lighting, color and shadows.

The premium package is a must lol. The geometry tool is such a life saver and gets rid of that annoying “distortion” effect that my lens sometimes loves to throw in my face.

I can’t wait to get an iPad so I can use a bigger screen to edit and see more of my photos since I am only using my phone at the moment. Lightroom is a god send!

by Brooke Haywood

Love LightroomPhotoVideoEditor! I’m mainly making this review to try to help some people who think their presets disappeared, because I can’t directly respond to reviews, so I’m making my own in hopes that this will help! I thought that all of my presets that I had made (over 40) were gone! & that I only had the original ones that came whenever you first downloaded LightroomPhotoVideoEditor . But then I figured out that whenever you press “Presets” up above those few in the top left it’ll say something like “Colors” & if you press on that, there are several options & “User Presets” was right there & I was able to press on that & view all of my presets! I really hope this helps people. Also, if I could respond to reviews I would, because I’ve seen people think their presets are gone & they’re not!

by C. Alexander

The latest update to allow masking with adjustments makes using this a joy to use not only on the desktop, but also on mobile. I begrudgingly paid for this and have since 2015, but this latest update has finally made me feel like the constant money pit has become a worthwhile investment. It isn’t like those “toy” apps that peddle cheap tricks that don’t really lend themselves to professional work and cater to the Samsung filter using types (you know, the absurd skin smoothing). This update has dramatically altered my workflow, and in only good ways! That’s why this is one of my only reviews on LightroomPhotoVideoEditor Store. If it works, great. If not, I just delete. You have to make an impression for me to “waste” my time reviewing an app. In this case, not a waste of time. ✊🏾

by Crazypaw

I’ve used their products for 10 years, and had a creative cloud membership for 3 years. I canceled my membership last week, because I never use it at home anymore. They charged me a $200 cancellation fee straight from my bank account without any warning. When trying to contact them it takes hours, and I’ve been hung up on multiple times. It’s been worse than an Uber customer service experience. They finally told me they would refund in 5 days. When that didn’t happen, I contacted them again and they told me another 5-7 days. I doubt I’ll ever get my $200 back without getting my bank involved. Never thought of Adobe as one of those sketchy companies with no morales and horrible customer service, but at the end of the day seems they’re no better than any other corporation. I’m done with them, and all the other companies just out to take your money and offer 0 accountability and integrity.

by Pokepokebtcheekecheeke

Load up your photos on your desktop or laptop from a REAL camera or phone. Create a collection in Lightroom, transfer to Photoshop and back to Lightroom. Share entire album within seconds to your contacts. Pretty smooth. Absolutely NOTHING comes close to what PSCC & Lightroom can do. Absolutely love this system.
I generally shoot with dslrs and use several features in photoshop that Lightroom can’t duplicate or run. I only have the “save as smart previews only” because the don’t take up much room on the server and I can send the “collections link” to anyone I wish to share. There is a slider to allow the sender to download the smart preview. Most of the senders are family and only view on their phones or tablets. I keep originals(RAW) on portable drives and connects with saved presets from PSCC/Lightroom.
This is still my best program for travel and family photos. I still can’t get away from focal lengths, aperatures available and picture quality of a real camera. I print and display my work at the office and my home . There is a difference between cell phone and larger sensor size. Physics still dominates , no way around that yet but, maybe in my lifetime ?

by Gofhotog

Love LightroomPhotoVideoEditor with the exception of one major missing item it would be really great if it would give you physical feedback for a focus point like it does horizontal and vertical. After using LightroomPhotoVideoEditor for a few days shooting cars for a auto dealer to post on the web, I just assumed that the quality of the images would be superior to the native camera on my iPhone. My images kept coming up blurry. Do to the nature of my work, I have to handhold my phone. Despite my trying to hold the phone steady. I then tried the native camera and was completely shocked to see that the images were sharp as a tack. I again assumed that LightroomPhotoVideoEditor would utilize the built in camera stabilization apparently it does not. Very disappointing to say the least. While I can see how LightroomPhotoVideoEditor would be great for landscapes and such. Unfortunately it does not work for my personal needs.

by LeonardoRoberto

LR classic long has been photos superior in terms of file management/organization (by a mile), but with cc now finally bringing lightroom into the cloud game - this is adobes attempt at the last piece of the puzzle that arguably had left the scales tipped in in favor of apple (arguably. and it’s a darn good fire errofinally found what to abandon a bit under featured for now (though new version is big improvement - except faces don’t seem to ever show up?), but combined with the OCD person’s wonder that is lightroom classic, lightroom is leaps and bounds better than apple. keep up the good work adobe. love you guys! jus pleaaaase don’t ever write lightroom classic out of the equation entirely (at least not until cc is as sophisticated as classic). i get that they serve two different purposes and generally for different target audiences, but them playing together nicely—as they do now—is critical.

by DJ Squirrel

Lightroom offers superior color editing, but the major issue is that if you haven’t used LightroomPhotoVideoEditor in some time, it doesn’t use your photo gallery like other apps do (by accessing the gallery to pick)—instead it loads the pictures into its own selection gallery and updates it based on the last time it loads. I edited a photo in October 2019 and here on December 1st 2019 I’ve taken a few hundred more photos, which means the last one I took and want to edit specifically isn’t accessible until the other few 700 ahead of it load first.
It’s annoying and relegates me to using the phone’s basic photo editing options instead when I want to get the work done now, not 10 minutes from now when I can actually select the photo I want.

by Guswillcreate

I’m going to start with the best things about LightroomPhotoVideoEditor . There’s nothing like it for mobile; the HDR, Raw, and manual settings are exceptional. The editing options are superb giving you curves, clipping and crushing colors when there’s no more information in the image. I feel confident enough to edit a photo on LightroomPhotoVideoEditor as much as I would with the desktop version. Now the negatives; I mentioned that one of my favorite things about LightroomPhotoVideoEditor is the camera, but yet I still find myself using the iPhone native camera more simply because is more accessible. I wish adobe would separate the camera from the editing software. Adobe please allow me to someone pull up my light room camera app as fast as I can with the stock camera. also, being able to record video with such camera app would be amazing.

by Maxblack113

Lightroom CC is the future of photography. Pretty much all the tools I need are included. The RAW camera for iPhone is incredible, plus the cloud syncing makes my workflow a breeze. On top of that, the updates just keep bringing more and more great features, proving they are truly putting your subscription money to good use. Great stuff!

Only a couple cons:
-The last update added a heal tool, but it is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. It works fine for a single blemish on otherwise perfect skin or something, but I’ve seen way better heal tools in really cheap apps (like pixelmator).
-The filters/presets are pretty bad. There’s maybe 2 or 3 good color presets and 2 or 3 good black and white presets. I know that presets are frowned upon by most pros, but sometimes they’re fun and creative and the selection of presets in LightroomPhotoVideoEditor is pretty lackluster. I know you can add more through the computer but that method is convoluted and LightroomPhotoVideoEditor should just come with better stock filters.

by :(!:(!35&25&&/4

UPDATE: I love this and how it has all the same features as the desktop version. But how do I disable camera role backup? I found out that the issue from earlier was not what I thought. I can see my photos in the cloud just fine. The issue is that my camera role photos keep backing up, but I don’t want to waste cloud storage, because those are already being backed up to Google Photos. How do I fix this?

Here is my original review:
“I have been using Lightroom Mobile since 2017. I also use it on my computer with a Creative Cloud Subscription. It always worked fine until the latest update came. I can’t view my photos which are synced in Lightroom through Creative Cloud anymore. It just shows me the photos from my camera roll. Useless.”

by Pajones058

Lightroom Cc is everything I wanted in a photo management system. I use it for storage. It has an astonishing number of ways to edit. I am getting great results. I watched the videos adobe provided and now know how to effectively use the features. The fact that your pictures can be seen on all devices, real time is one of the strongest features.

The one feature that is much needed is to be able to identify which photos are not in folders. I have 12,000 pictures and am overwhelmed to find those that didn’t make it into albums. I also had a lot of trouble with photos duplicating on the original upload.

But don’t let these two issues stop you from buying this great, integrated package.

by CA-JR

This may be my first product review, but I am very eager to share my experience. Thanks to Lightroom CC, I can shoot beautiful raw photos (in HDR), easily organize them, easily fix/improve them, and automatically upload them to the cloud where they don’t eat up space on my phone. I must say that I feel like about 95% of the time I can tweak photos to look exactly what I am hoping for. A major reason for this is the ability to highlight just a region of the photo and adjust the brightness/color to that region. And it is really nice how how LightroomPhotoVideoEditor also ties fairly seamlessly with other Adobe apps such as the two Photoshop apps. I could go on and on about other features I like and other minor things that just are smart and show Adobe was paying attention to detail. My complaints are few and far between, and I’m sure will get tweaked in future version.

For these reasons, I am generally confident 90% of the time just walking around with my iPhone to take pictures rather than my bulky Canon 5D Mark IV.

My friends keep asking me what app I am using for taking and editing the pictures. I keep telling them they should get LightroomPhotoVideoEditor.