First impressions of lightroom mobile and lightroom classic CC combo

I am writing this for anyone who finds themselves in similar position I have been past few weeks, craving a mobile solution to review newly captured shots, perform initial edits, and maybe finalize images on desktop at later date (if needed), but not knowing exactly how to accomplish that and being new to product offerings that are currenty out there.

During a very recent vacation in Europe I averaged ~170 new shots per week with my Nikon D500 and in the process I discovered that I was sorely missing ability to upload images to a mobile device and perform basic adjustments. I shoot solely RAW format. During the past couple of weeks I started doing some research and came across Lightroom Photoshop CC mobile for the first time. I have been running Lightroom 6 desktop (perpetual license) for about a year now and knew it was no longer supported by Adobe, essentially forcing everyone to migrate to their cloud based plans if they wanted software with current support and latest upgrades, something I somewhat resent to be honest, especially after quite recently parting with $150 for the perpetual license.

Anyway, decided to go out and buy a new 12.9" iPad pro and give Lightroom CC mobile a whirl. What I was not expecting was that this decision has likely permanently tranformed the way I will work with my images! Based on initial impressions over past few days of experimentation, I can foresee that all my initial editing will be performed on the iPad with final review and touch ups (if required) on desktop. I also strongly considered getting a basic MacBook Pro (13" screen) to have the mobility and also being able to run same version of Lightroom as on my desktop (not only that but ability to calibrate the mobile display with my i1-pro to match the desktop exactly), but the iPad together with Apple pencil provides a very compelling solution, natural, intuitive and interactive environment for photo editing that a non-touch screen solution will never be able to match. The latest iPad pro has an incredible wide gamut display that is a sheer joy to use. Moreover, by holding it side by side with my D65 calibrated desktop monitor whilst displaying synced images, the images are very closely matched provided Apple's True Tone function is disabled. The iPad has a slightly cooler native whitepoint, but the offset from 6500K does not appear to be much. So, I can live with that. I will know that my images will appear only slightly warmer on the D65 calibrated desktop monitor and if needed I can easily account for that offset during initial mobile editing, or after the fact on the desktop. If Apple True Tone is enabled the images will clearly be too warm with a relatively large negative offset from 6500K, so this function should be disabled.

In so far as uploading images to my iPad and syncing to desktop, I’ve encountered no issues connecting my D500 directly to the iPad using Apple’s lightning to USB3 camera adapter to upload RAW data to the iPad. Initially I thought I would get away with syncing images from the iPad to Lightroom 6 on the desktop (and this did work!), but then I quickly realized that all the latest profiles available in CC mobile (especially the new Adobe profiles that I immediately found to be useful) are not supported in the discontinued Lightroom 6, so grudgingly I downloaded Lightroom classic CC v7.4 last night. Now there is no possibility of profile mismatch between Lightroom CC mobile and Lightroom Classic desktop. From the short time I have experimented with Lightroom CC mobile I can say that I am probably a fan of Adobe’s new picture profiles and will be using them a lot. It seems that they have found a golden zone between flat, neutral, portrait, standard, landscape, etc. and the corresponding camera compatible profiles. For the Nikon D500 at-least the camera compatible profiles appear to be more aggressive in terms of contrast and saturation for standard, landscape and vivid, and this does not give the desired result for all images, requiring more effort and tweaking to get image right. Having both the new Adobe and legacy camera compatible profiles is very useful. In first few days of playing with Lightroom CC mobile I have found that iteratively selecting different profiles and then hitting the AUTO adjust function after setting a new picture profile can quite quickly provide the the desired result without too much additional tweaking effort. This is really quite impressive in my opinion and a dramatic simplification compared to my previous desktop only workflow (that involved Nikon Capture NX-D and exporting TIFF's to Lightroom 6 for final adjustments).

Syncing between mobile and desktop seemed to work well. As soon as I activated syncing on my desktop it started downloading the RAW images from the Cloud to the desktop and all edits done on the mobile platform perfectly matched what was displayed in classic CC. Any subsequent edits done in CC mobile on the iPad were applied automatically on the desktop within a few seconds to a minute or so. Reverse process from desktop to iPad also seems to work fine.

So, to cut a long story short 🙂 I think I have found a winning, very convenient and pleasingly interactive new workflow. Very much enjoying sitting in my comfy chair with the iPad pro, Apple pencil and a J&T! 🙂 We will see what the coming weeks bring and if my initial positive impressions stand the test of time. I will unfortunately have to pay $9.99 per month after my 7-day trial ends, but might be worth it due to the sheer convenience of this setup. I was not willing to give up the additional feature set of Lightroom classic CC and go for the more streamlined Lightroom CC on desktop, especially since that seems to currently imply losing a massive amount of flexibility in terms of file export options. Nor am I enthusiastic about paying an additional $129 to upgrade to Windows 10 from my current Windows 7 to support Lightroom CC. Doubt that my 2012 generation motherboard would support such an upgrade in any case. This means I am stuck with the 20GB plan unfortunately and we will see how that works going forward and how much management is involved. I will get Photoshop to play with, but won’t be able test Lightroom CC desktop that’s bundled into that package.

Anyway, hope this monologue of mine may be helpful to others who are in a similar position to the one I have been in over past few weeks! Cheers!

P.S. forgot to uncheck the question box. New to this forum 🙂