Macworld:
Apple on Thursday announced that Adobe Lightroom is now available in the Mac App Store. An app for creative professionals who work in photography, Lightroom comes with a full set of tools for managing thousands upon thousands of photos, as well as editing tools for retouching and fine-tuning.
There’s no difference between the MAS version of Lightroom and Adobe’s version that you get directly from the company; the features are the same. Like the Adobe-sold version, the MAS version is sold as subscription-based software after a 7-day free trial. After that, it’s $9.99 per month, which puts you in Adobe’s Lightroom plan that includes 1TB of Creative Cloud file storage and access to the mobile and web versions of Lightroom.
Cue the inevitable complains about Adobe’s subscription plans.
Subscription or not, you’re missing Photoshop in this deal if you go through the App Store. Better to subscribe with Adobe and get the real power of that combination. But I’m biased. Never liked Lightroom to begin with. Aperture was better, but couldn’t keep its support inside Apple, sadly.
Depends. You choose between no Photoshop and 1TB of storage and Photoshop and “only” 20GB of storage. Not everyone needs Photoshop.
Okay, that makes sense. You get 20 gigs if you get Photoshop. But not in the app store. Lightroom without Photoshop is useless to me. But I’ve been using it every day at work since May of 1992. So it’s a no-brainer for me. At work. I’ve cancelled my subscription at home. How else am I gonna pay for my subscription to Hulu with no ads? 🙂
You’re also missing Lightroom Classic which the Adobe direct online $9.99 plan gets you. The app store version, unless I’ve misunderstood, is just the Creative Cloud one which only works with photos in the cloud and doesn’t have all the features of LR Classic.
So if you want a lot of rental storage and are happy with the lesser featured LR CC vs Classic and no Photoshop, this plan is the cheapest way to rent 1Tb from Adobe. I don’t find either of them good value but if I were picking one, I’d take the 20G + 3 applications version myself.
Would be nice not to have to update via the Adobe app of course, updates via the app store are much better.