Adobe Lightroom is now available in the Mac App Store. The first flagship Adobe service added to Apple's redesigned App Store, Lightroom is a popular choice among creative pros for editing, organizing and storing photos.
Lightroom on the Mac App costs the same as it does on Adobe.com, or $9.99/month for 1TB of cloud storage. That subscription gives you access to Lightroom on MacBooks, mobile and the web.
Credit: Apple
Apple confirmed that the Mac app will be functionally identical to the Lightroom program Adobe offers through its website. A Lightroom app has long been available on iOS, but its addition to the Mac App Store is another success in Apple's push to bring the conveniences of mobile over to its laptops and desktops.
For those who aren't familiar with the app, Adobe's Lightroom gives you some of the same photo manipulation tools as Photoshop but is generally a better option for most users because of its ability to import, organize, find and manage images.
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Lightroom also has greater ease of use, though some professional photographers will prefer Photoshop for the greater control it gives you over an image.
Apple provided a rundown of the features a photographer can expect in the Lightroom Mac app. For one, Lightroom uses Adobe Sensei AI to analyze imported images to identify and tag objects or people so that you can quickly find those photos.
Credit: Apple
The Mac app will also come with an auto-editing tool, which, as the name suggests, will automatically alter the exposure, contrast and other elements of a photo. This tool is particularly useful for beginners because it will then tell them what changes were made.
More advanced tools in Lightroom for Mac include Tone Curve for editing shadows and highlights, as well as Color Mixer for adjusting hue, saturation and luminance. Once you have your image perfected, you can simply copy your adjustment panels and use them on the next photo to make the same changes (you only want to try this if both images have similar lighting).
As Apple continues to add popular software to the App Store, it will become easier for Mac users to launch and update their favorite app from one location. Microsoft recently made its Office suite available on the Mac App Store so macOS users could quickly access Word, Excel, Powerpoint and other Microsoft programs.
