Playing with the new Lightroom CC - Adobe Doesn't Cut A Good Impression

[Internaut]

I did my first editing while out and about today.  I'm finding a lot to like with the new approach, but also enough things wrong with the implementation to kill it for me.

WHAT I DID

Obviously, I took some photos.  Then I went for a coffee and uploaded them to Lightroom CC using my Android phone (plus a USB-C to SD card adapter).  I did some editing, when home, continued editing on my iPad, and finished editing on my MacBook.  Then I struggled with publishing part of the workflow!

WHAT I LIKED

Having the photos in the cloud allows a level of freedom that should be hard to let go of.  The basic editing functions on Android and iOS are fine.  On the iPad, I found LR CC works seamlessly with an application called Photoshop Fix, and this made it very easy for me to clone out the odd dust spot and remove an unwanted element for from one image (not supported within LR CC for iOS, as far as I can tell).

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE

There's no camera calibration, which seems a bit odd bearing in mind this is just ACR in the cloud.  With my Sony and Olympus cameras, Lightroom Classic provides profiles that mirror some of the colour/creative modes of the camera, and this can provide a good/quick start when editing.

Then there's the sharing options.  On the Mac, I can share to Facebook only.  To share to Flickr, I had to save the photos as full sized JPEGs and then upload using the sharing options from within Finder.  Incidentally, the photos get saved to an arbitrary location that cannot, as far as I can tell, be changed.  So publishing outside of Adobe's cloud is a mess.  I've yet to find an approach that doesn't replace the title I entered in Lightroom with either a blank or the filename. 

It's been mentioned pretty much everywhere that you need damned good internet to make this work.  I did my uploading over the 4G network (I have a 20GB monthly allowance) but this was still quite slow since 4G is shaped around consuming data, not uploading.  With both iOS and Android, there's no way to upload directly from the SD card to Lightroom CC.  You must first copy the contents of the card to the device.  I can understand this issue with iOS since Apple keeps this OS heavily locked down.  I suspect the issue is fixable with Android.  Either way, make sure you have sufficient space on your iPad, iPhone or Android device.

I thought the facilities for black and white conversion were pretty poor.  For example, I don't see selectable colour filters, and there presets in the mobile apps that I don't see on the desktop.

Finally, and speaking of differences between the desktop, mobile and web apps, I observe they don't all do Upright the same:

• On the mobile apps, Upright is limited to levelling only.
  On the desktop app, it appears to be fully implemented.
  

Why?  If it's all being done on Adobe's servers anyway, they might as well make it the same across all devices.

[pearlstreet]

Thanks for posting this. I'm sticking with classic. I do use lr on my ipad quite a bit.

[Alan Goldhammer]

It's been mentioned pretty much everywhere that you need damned good internet to make this work.  I did my uploading over the 4G network (I have a 20GB monthly allowance) but this was still quite slow since 4G is shaped around consuming data, not uploading. 

I think Verizon has the fastest 4G mobile network but upload speed is reported to be 2-5 Mb/sec which is less than half of the download speed.  My FIOS upload speed on my home network is 25 Mb/sec according to speed tests that I've run.  If you have a lot of pictures to upload it could take a while if you are doing it over 4G, you are probably better off going to Starbucks and using their WiFi while you have a cup of coffee.