Adobe announced Lightroom Classic CC vs Lightroom CC for 2018. Is there a right choice? The new product has the old name, the old product now sounds like poor marketing, and you may end up paying more for storage. What's your best option?

Lightroom Classic CC vs Lightroom CC – Why Did Adobe Do This to Us?

I know what you're thinking. Adobe hates its customers. What other reason would a company have for taking one of its most popular products and giving its name to a new product, and then saddling the old product with a “Classic” name?

Now we have Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom CC.

This is just incredibly stupid product management. Assigning the product name to a new product just causes confusion among customers. Yes, I'm sure Adobe can explain it, but I look at it from a blogger's point of view.

Over the years, I wrote articles on Lightroom CC. Now when people use a search engine, what product results will they get? The new product or the old product?

Both have the same name! Even the logos are similar, using the same combination of letters. The only difference is the color of text and the curved border.

Lightroom Classic CC

The product you previously knew as Lightroom CC is now Lightroom Classic CC. It's sort of like what happened to Coca-Cola years ago.

Coke decided to change its formula to make it sweeter, which gave us New Coke. People didn't like that at all, so Coke came back as Coke Classic. Both were on the market at the same time. So something that you knew as Coke wasn't really coke. The Coke you knew was now Coke Classic.

Now Adobe made the same blunder. The Lightroom CC you knew is now Lightroom Classic CC. A pretender wears the Lightroom CC label.

With Lightroom CC Classic, you get exactly what you had before – a file based system to use on your local PC or Mac. It has all of the features that it had a couple of weeks ago, but now we're promised that it's faster.

Again.

How many times has Adobe promised us that Lightroom got faster? Adobe promised us speed improvements by using the GPU chip and other methods. No doubt those tricks improved some operations. Yet the obvious truth is that Lightroom is dog-slow for photo management.

It makes me miss Aperture for photo management.

Now we're told that you can move sliders and brushes faster. Excuse me while I contain my enthusiasm.

Another new feature is Range Masking for selections. The good news is that it works. The idea is that you still create your mask with the traditional tools – brush, gradient, etc. Then you can choose either a Color or Luminance masking option. Put an eyedropper on the area you want to select and it adjusts your mask to match.

I tried it and it works, so this is a useful new tool.

Lightroom CC

Old name, new product. Lightroom CC is for the mobile generation. It's a cloud-based tool, much like Apple's Photos and iCloud service. It's about as deep as Photos, too. This product – Lightroom CC – is NOT what you expect from Lightroom. In fact, it has a long list of features from Lightroom Classic CC that don't exist in Lightroom CC (New Coke).

* Apply preset on import, add metadata

* Smart collections

* Slideshow

* Prints and photobooks

* Geotagging map

* Tone Curve

* Split Tones

* HDR merge

* Panorama stitching

Perhaps we'll see some of these features added in Lightroom CC in the future. My gut feeling is that this product wasn't ready to launch, but here it is.

Lightroom CC works on desktop, smart phones and tablets.