Free with Adobe Photography Plan

My photo-editing tool of choice is Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I still find it hard to believe that we can get both of these powerful editing tools for less than £10 per month. Bear in mind that ten years ago, the latest versions would have cost close to £1,000 to buy outright. Did you know that when you subscribe to the Creative Cloud Photography Plan, you receive quite a few other products for free?

Two versions of Lightroom

The Photography Plan doesn’t contain one version of Lightroom – you get two! The one that I would recommend you use most of the time is Adobe Lightroom Classic – the most direct descendant of the stand-alone version. It’s also the most powerful of the two versions, with one or two functions only available in Classic and not the lighter version.

Classic stores the photographs on your hard drive, whereas the other Lightroom stores your photos in the cloud. A cloud-based solution can be a great idea as your photos are available anywhere you are, so it’s great for editing on the move. The kicker comes in the cost of storage. In the basic Photography Plan, you get 20GB of storage. Given I am shooting on 128GB cards and each photo is around 45MB on my Canon R5, the free storage is enough for about 450 pictures – clearly not enough. I have approximately 10TB of photos in my Lightroom catalogue on various hard drives, backed up to a Cloud Service from CrashPlan. To achieve something similar through the Creative Cloud solution, I would need to pay over £100 per month.

There are some things in the Cloud version of Lightroom that I would love. I already add keywords to my photograph to help find photos in the future. Adobe has built a brilliant artificial intelligence engine that can identify what’s in the picture and make it searchable in the cloud version. I don’t see why Adobe couldn’t add this to the Classic version of Lightroom whenever it’s connected to the internet, and then there would only need to be one version of Lightroom to keep up to date.

Actually, there’s a third version of Lightroom!

You can also use Lightroom on a mobile device such as your phone or tablet. For an on-the-go tool, it’s powerful enough, and you can even sync the photos back to Lightroom Classic on your desktop using the 20GB of ‘free’ storage in the Photography plan. Do this by changing the Lightroom Classic preferences to download the photos added to a mobile device to a specific location on your hard drive. I like to have every photo in the Pictures folder and then inside a folder for the year, the month, and the date the picture was taken.

Not just photographers – videographers too

Many photographers I know mainly take stills and occasionally dip into shooting video. Adobe has recognised this and includes a cut-down version of Adobe Premiere called Premiere Rush. There are desktop and mobile versions to do basic video editing either on the go or at your desk.

While Premiere Rush sounds like a basic video editor, it will probably do most of what you need to share videos on social media. You can add titles, create transitions between cut-aways and add extra audio onto the clips.

How about a website?

As you start to get better at taking photos, you may want to start sharing your pictures on your own website. You could try to build a WordPress site using some basic free templates. Alternatively, you could use a service such as Squarespace to create an all-singing and dancing site, but that comes with a fee. Alternatively, you can use Adobe Portfolio, which comes free with Creative Cloud, to create a site using a variety of really nice templates. The functionality to make the site is limited as photos can only be displayed with no option to sell.

Also included in the Photography Plan

In total, there are 23 different programs, apps and web platforms included in the Photography Plan. There’s a mobile version of Photoshop with many of the powerful editing tools available on your phone or tablet. Need to add text to your photos? No problem, you have access to Adobe Fonts with thousands of different text styles available to use through Photoshop. Best of all, if you don’t know how to do something in Lightroom, Photoshop or Premiere Rush, then there’s a whole number of tutorials available on the Adobe Creative Cloud website

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About the author

As well as running Edinburgh Photography Workshop, Rich Dyson is a professional photographer. His photographs are regularly used in newspapers such as The Times, Guardian and Daily Telegraph. He also had two solo exhibitions as well as being featured in a members sponsored exhibition in the Scottish Parliament. You can see and buy his photography at richdysonphotography.com