Lightroom Classic without Photoshop

Stephen L

Stephen L

I asked a Stupid Question Once...
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Stephen
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Simple question (I hope). I use and enjoy LR Classic, but I don’t want Photoshop. It’s OTT for my needs. Is it possible to buy or subscribe to LR Classic without PS?
 
I do not think it is possible. I do have two other simpler editors Elements and Affinity but neither meet my needs as I use many features in PS though it does have many Graphic Designer features I do not need.

Dave
 
Stephen L said:
Simple question (I hope). I use and enjoy LR Classic, but I don’t want Photoshop. It’s OTT for my needs. Is it possible to buy or subscribe to LR Classic without PS?
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No it's not. I had LR version 6 as standalone but lost it when I changed PCs, version 6 was the last standalone version and since then it has always required a subscription at something around £120 per year. I decided I was paying a lot of money for an awful of stuff that I just don't use so knocked it on the head last year. After much soul-searching and on line investigation of different packages I finally threw my lot in with ON1. I found it as close to LR as I could and there is a lot of stuff on it that I have yet to discover. They have many, many youtube videos on it's functions and attributes so you're not short on support. It is available as a standalone for £101 here: BuyON1
 
Amazon sell a years subscription, for £99, so not much difference in the price, of that plus PS.
 
Hi, Just an addition to Martin's advice above on ON1 photo Raw. If you watch Scott Davenports YouTube video on On1 2022 there is a code that brings down the price from £102 to £81.75, yes you have to pay each year for the updates if you wish to but the program still works without the lose of anything if you don't want to update. Would point out check your computers specs before or if you take the plunge to On1. Russ.

​

 
I’ve just looked and it seems my Adobe Photography subscription is paid up till Nay 2024, so I guess there’s no point in doing anything till then, especially since I really love Lightroom. I have Affinity (and also PureRaw 2) so I can just ignore PS if I wish.
 
I ditched LR subs last year reinstalled my old LR, it does what I need, ok missing some of the new features that were nice and may have to reconsider if bought a new camera, cross that bridge when I come to it :)
 
I was in the same position. I never went beyond LR6.14 for the obvious reason. I decided to go with Photolab as an alternative. I imported my olympus files into LR and then used Photolab to "pre-process" individual files which looked particularly promising then exported them back into LR6.14 for processing. Now I have a new body which LR doesn't recognise so now I import them into Photolab first and export to LR for final processing. It's another learning curve, of course.

I just don't understand why Adobe don't sell a LR only subscription.
 
jerry12953 said:
I was in the same position. I never went beyond LR6.14 for the obvious reason. I decided to go with Photolab as an alternative. I imported my olympus files into LR and then used Photolab to "pre-process" individual files which looked particularly promising then exported them back into LR6.14 for processing. Now I have a new body which LR doesn't recognise so now I import them into Photolab first and export to LR for final processing. It's another learning curve, of course.

I just don't understand why Adobe don't sell a LR only subscription.
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Likely it's just not profitable enough. If LR & PS together are £10 per month it's likely they will make more than if they cut to £6.50 month for LR only. The product costs almost nothing to supply, so doing a lower cost product loses them money.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Likely it's just not profitable enough. If LR & PS together are £10 per month it's likely they will make more than if they cut to £6.50 month for LR only. The product costs almost nothing to supply, so doing a lower cost product loses them money.
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Of course..... it's all about the money!
 
If you are determined to do without Photoshop, you can get Lightroom (but not LR Classic) on its own, which comes with 1TB of online storage, but it's the same £9.98/month price as Lightroom Classic bundled with Photoshop and 20TB of online storage.
 
Musicman said:
If you are determined to do without Photoshop, you can get Lightroom (but not LR Classic) on its own, which comes with 1TB of online storage, but it's the same £9.98/month price as Lightroom Classic bundled with Photoshop and 20TB of online storage.
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As I’m paying nothing until 2024 (only just discovered that) I’ll keep my powder dry till then. No way do I want a version of LR which is only on a tablet.
 
Stephen L said:
No way do I want a version of LR which is only on a tablet.
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It's not. Lightroom (CC) has been a desktop application in its own right for about five years now, in addition to running on mobile platforms which share the same cloud-based storage.

Lightroom CC has pretty much caught up with the LR Classic feature set (and IIRC has overtaken it in a couple of small areas to do with AI processing). The principal difference these days is whether you are using cloud storage first or disk storage first.

petapixel.com

Lightroom Classic and CC Are Nearly Identical, So Why Two Programs?

Functionally identical.
petapixel.com petapixel.com

For myself, I have nearly 5TB of photos on local storage, so I'm probably sticking with LR Classic, but YMMV.

e2a: there is a Lightroom Mobile Premium plan that is for only mobile devices such as a tablet, but that's half the price of Lightroom (for desktop) at about £5 a month through an in-App purchase.
 
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And therein lies another issue. I refuse to store my data on a third party server outwith my control. :) This old former IT systems manager is too set in my ways.
 
jerry12953 said:
Of course..... it's all about the money!
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Have you ever been involved with software production and maintenance, it is costly and has to be paid for. It seems common for people to part with money for hardware but have a considerable reluctance to pay for software. The Adobe software package is almost certainly the most sophisticated software that most would use on a home computer. It is unfortunate that PS was primarily designed for Graphic designers and photographic features added later. Adobe's only attempt to just pull out the Photographic features was Elements but this was too simplified.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
Have you ever been involved with software production and maintenance, it is costly and has to be paid for. It seems common for people to part with money for hardware but have a considerable reluctance to pay for software. The Adobe software package is almost certainly the most sophisticated software that most would use on a home computer. It is unfortunate that PS was primarily designed for Graphic designers and photographic features added later. Adobe's only attempt to just pull out the Photographic features was Elements but this was too simplified.

Dave
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Adobe turnover in 2021 = $15.78 Billion.
 
Dave Canon said:
It is unfortunate that PS was primarily designed for Graphic designers and photographic features added later.
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Speaking as someone who has experience using pretty much every version of Photoshop since v1.1 (and was selling it in the early 90s) I can assure you that is categorically untrue.

It was a photographic image editing tool first. Graphic designers twigged that they could do stuff with it and Adobe followed that market with features later. Heck, editable type didn’t arrive until v5.0.
 
Musicman said:
Speaking as someone who has experience using pretty much every version of Photoshop since v1.1 (and was selling it in the early 90s) I can assure you that is categorically untrue.

It was a photographic image editing tool first. Graphic designers twigged that they could do stuff with it and Adobe followed that market with features later. Heck, editable type didn’t arrive until v5.0.
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I find LR to be intuitive. I just use it and rarely have to look up help. PS is at the other extreme for me, not at all intuitive and very frustrating. Some say this is because I am a mathematician/scientist and not at all artistic. PS often gives no indication of the next step.
 
That’s probably fair, but it reflects the fact that Lightroom was created over fifteen years later with a clear workflow process in mind. It was designed from the ground up just for the task of cataloguing and editing photographs; explicitly as a clean slate exercise, building on (and reacting to) the experience acquired with Photoshop.

There’s an old adage that there are usually six ways to do any given task in Photoshop; over the years it’s become a Swiss Army knife of an application. Photoshop is incredibly powerful, but to get the most out of it you have to take control, and it takes a lot of skill and hard graft to master. I have worked alongside professional retouchers who can the do amazing things with Photoshop, which you could not hope to do with Lightroom.
 
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Musicman said:
There’s an old adage that there are usually six ways to do any given task in Photoshop; over the years it’s become a Swiss Army knife of an application. Photoshop is incredibly powerful, but to get the most out of it you have to take control, and it takes a lot of skill and hard graft to master. I have worked alongside professional retouchers who can the do amazing things with Photoshop, which you could not hope to do with Lightroom.
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I just wish I had those skills. When I retire I may take a course to learn the basics and if I use PS on a regular basis I should I improve. As I try to minimise editing, in most cases, LR does all I require.
 
The most cost effective way to subscribe to Lightroom/Photoshop is to buy an annual pre paid subscription when it’s on offer (usually 2-3 times a year). I recently picked one up off Amazon this way during the Amazon prime sale and it works out at £6.05 a month. I don’t use photoshop but I do have a website using the added on Adobe portfolio so happy with that monthly price for lightroom and a website even if I don’t make the most of it and use Photoshop.
 
jerry12953 said:
Adobe turnover in 2021 = $15.78 Billion.
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That's turnover, not profit. What are their costs? I know they are raking it in since moving to a subscription model but if every man and his dog hadn't pirated PS and LR maybe they wouldn't have felt the need to. I'm fully invested in the Creative Cloud photography plan, I pay £20 a month for the 1TB plan with LR, LR Classic and Photoshop. I use LR primarily on my iPad, quite often on my phone and occasionally on my PC. The licence allows you to install on two computers so my dad uses LR Classic on his PC, as I never use Classic anymore. My website is built on Adobe Portfolio, and my entire LR catalog of over 36,000 images is stored in the cloud so I can access it anywhere, on any of my devices.

I almost never use PS but it's nice to know it's there when I need it. I made the seating plan board for my wedding using it and I've done star trails using it in the past.

And as has been said above, they are a massively successful company that make lots of software used around the world. I'd hope they were turning over and making billions every year.
 
RichardC27 said:
That's turnover, not profit. What are their costs? I know they are raking it in since moving to a subscription model but if every man and his dog hadn't pirated PS and LR maybe they wouldn't have felt the need to. I'm fully invested in the Creative Cloud photography plan, I pay £20 a month for the 1TB plan with LR, LR Classic and Photoshop. I use LR primarily on my iPad, quite often on my phone and occasionally on my PC. The licence allows you to install on two computers so my dad uses LR Classic on his PC, as I never use Classic anymore. My website is built on Adobe Portfolio, and my entire LR catalog of over 36,000 images is stored in the cloud so I can access it anywhere, on any of my devices.

I almost never use PS but it's nice to know it's there when I need it. I made the seating plan board for my wedding using it and I've done star trails using it in the past.

And as has been said above, they are a massively successful company that make lots of software used around the world. I'd hope they were turning over and making billions every year.
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Shrug.......
 
To be honest I don't use photoshop for photos much except for a little final tweak to levels (for some reason I never quite get it right straight out of LR), resizing and sharpening. And if I need layers or cloning etc, but that's rare.

There's a legacy version of Photoshop CS2 floating around on the web which you can freely download and install, which has all the basic functions.
 
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Brentor said:
I find LR to be intuitive. I just use it and rarely have to look up help. PS is at the other extreme for me, not at all intuitive and very frustrating. Some say this is because I am a mathematician/scientist and not at all artistic. PS often gives no indication of the next step.
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Photoshop requires a very disciplined and structured approach to editing and you really need to put a lot of effort into learning how it works. While, as a generalisation, you can get away with using LR by just playing around and seeing what happens, you won't even get started with PS with this approach.

As a statistician/scientist I find the control of workflow and the precision of the tools in PS, far more comfortable to work with than LR, and I'm a little bamboozled as to why some have suggested your problem might be your mathematician/scientist background. PS just has a much steeper learning curve before you can do "anything" worthwhile, but once you learn how to use it (and I am still very much learning) it's hard to go back to to the constraints of LR or even C1.

Having admitted my bamboozlement, and thought a bit more, I think there may be a difference in that PS is slower to use and more suited to "one off" images destined for hanging on the wall, or the cover of Vogue etc where the photographer (or client) is seeking a very close match to their photographic vision (arguably more "artistic" aims).

LR is more suited to dealing with large numbers of images that need processed to a high standard, but with less individual ("creative") treatment/control needed on each image.

Of course I am generalising to the extreme with this dichotomy, but maybe it's photographers with the more "artistic/expressive" aims that are willing to put the much greater effort than learning Lightroom, into learning PS.
 
I wonder if this is an artificial dichotomy. LR is designed for image development, PS for pixel level editing. It is natural to want both facilities available. Not every image should need major cloning or colour channel swapping unless that's your trademark, but a few may. So LR will be used most of the time for developing conventional images.

Perhaps some of this comes from the way traditional PS features like cloning and merging have become part of the LR toolbox.
 
ancient_mariner said:
I wonder if this is an artificial dichotomy.
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Yes it is, which is part of why I said "generalising to the extreme". And, I don't disagree with what you have written, but I am aware that many people never use PS (only LR), and equally many people never use LR, preferring a Bridge/ACR/PS work flow.

But I wasn't thinking about the obvious pixel editing capabilities like major cloning, composites, channel swapping etc, I was still thinking of basic editing e.g. dodging and burning, simple selections, subtle colour adjustments etc. which I find more precise to use, and easier to manage, through layers in PS than in LR.

Nearly all of the time, I could "get away" with using LR (or C1 in my case, which is a bit closer to PS than LR is). However, laziness and familiarity usually keeps me in C1 longer than I should, But when I do go into PS, I'm always struck at how much easier things are in PS, and understand why so many of the photographers I follow use PS as their main editing tool. I've only started to seriously use PS in the last year or so, but I wish I had done it years ago.

Maybe I need to try and explain what I mean by "easier", because LR is easier to learn, but to get an image processed to match how I see it in my head, and remember it from the time of taking, is much easier in PS. Or at least its becoming easier as I put the time into properly learning PS.

I suppose, I feel that the difficulty of learning PS (or Affinity Photo), is possibly stopping people finding a more satisfying way of editing their photographs. Not for everyone of course, but coming from the film days, I feel that 50% of a photograph comes from the "taking" and 50% from the "processing" and PS feels a better match to the way I want to work.
 
I have had to give lessons on using LR and PS. Generally, I found the students knew very little of how to best use LR and particularly not getting the best from the library feature and printing. They had often learned the basic editing features in Elements which were fairly easily repeated in PS. I can do much of my basic editing in LR but do need PS for any layers work and generally apply plugins from PS.

Dave
 
More financial info from Adobe .....

  • Adobe revenue for the quarter ending May 31, 2022 was $4.386B, a 14.37% increase year-over-year.
  • Adobe revenue for the twelve months ending May 31, 2022 was $16.693B, a 16.01% increase year-over-year.
  • Adobe annual revenue for 2021 was $15.785B, a 22.67% increase from 2020.
  • Adobe annual revenue for 2020 was $12.868B, a 15.19% increase from 2019.
  • Adobe annual revenue for 2019 was $11.171B, a 23.71% increase from 2018.
Adobe annual gross profit for 2021 was $13.92B, a 24.89% increase from 2020.
Adobe annual gross profit for 2020 was $11.146B, a 17.35% increase from 2019.
Adobe annual gross profit for 2019 was $9.498B, a 21.23% increase from 2018.

It looks like they're doing OK.
 
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jerry12953 said:
More financial info from Adobe .....

  • Adobe revenue for the quarter ending May 31, 2022 was $4.386B, a 14.37% increase year-over-year.
  • Adobe revenue for the twelve months ending May 31, 2022 was $16.693B, a 16.01% increase year-over-year.
  • Adobe annual revenue for 2021 was $15.785B, a 22.67% increase from 2020.
  • Adobe annual revenue for 2020 was $12.868B, a 15.19% increase from 2019.
  • Adobe annual revenue for 2019 was $11.171B, a 23.71% increase from 2018.
Adobe annual gross profit for 2021 was $13.92B, a 24.89% increase from 2020.
Adobe annual gross profit for 2020 was $11.146B, a 17.35% increase from 2019.
Adobe annual gross profit for 2019 was $9.498B, a 21.23% increase from 2018.

It looks like they're doing OK.
Click to expand...

Not exactly ploughing a lot of the turnover back into R&D then.
 
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