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Photographers who happen to be part of the Android camp can finally get their Lightroom workflow on the go. Adobe has officially announced the release of Adobe Lightroom Mobile to the Google Play store.
The app works much like its iOS counterpart already does, giving you the ability sync your photo collections to the cloud and have changes and adjustments reflected either on your mobile device or Lightroom desktop automatically. There are a couple of limitations, naturally.
For starters, the only adjustments you can make on mobile are the ones found in the “basic” tab within Lightroom. No big deal there if all you’re after is a quick contrast or color tweak. You also can’t use any custom presets you have setup on desktop Lightroom, but you do get a suite of standard presets to use (and Adobe tells us they’re still exploring the possibility of bringing custom presets at a later date).
That said, if you make a change to an image on the desktop version it will be fully and accurately reflected once you sync that photo to mobile. In other words, you won’t be able to fully ditch your desktop Lightroom, but you don’t have to feel like you need to be tethered to your PC for simple tasks.
You can edit photos from a variety of different sources. RAW format photos uploaded straight from your DSLR or transferred to your phone with certain WiFi-enabled cameras and memory cards. Photos taken with your phone and sent into Lightroom while on the go. Even an image you download from the internet. All of it can be imported and manipulated in Lightroom Mobile.
There are a couple of noteworthy caveats:
- You must have a phone with a Quad-Core Arm V7 processor with at least 1.7GHz clock speed, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage to ensure the best possible performance.
- You’ll need to have Lightroom 5.4 or later and have a phone with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean or later.
- You must have an Adobe Creative Cloud membership (there’s a nice Photography edition that’ll get you Lightroom and Photoshop for $10 per month.
Those aren’t unreasonable demands, we’d say. And if you are a new customer you’ll even be treated to a free 30-day trial to see if you like it. Not bad. The app should find its way into the Google Play Store at some point later today, and we’ll be updating this post with a direct link in case you’re interested. Now go shoot some more photos!
[via Adobe]
I always love trying out some new photo editors, but I’m most upset that Google hasn’t updated Snapseed since October ’13. Incredibly buggy for me and I can’t help but believe it’s because of the lack of updates.
From what I understand, most of the features from Snapseed have been implemented into google photos. I think they will just keep focusing on that app, as it has more exposure since it comes pre-bundled with most phones.
Eh. In my opinion, editing photos via Lightroom or something similar on a phone/tablet isn’t as good if you’re not shooting in RAW format. When it comes to JPEG editing, you can only do so much before the picture looks over saturated or just over edited.
I think the really convenient thing is nothing to do with editing – just the ability to cull and rate images without being chained to a computer.
FINALLY. We’ll find out if its worth anything tonight! My concern is screen calibration on mobile devices. My desktop monitor is calibrated, but my Shield Tab and XPeria Z3 are notably not.
Not compatible with my Nexus 7? It works for my Nexus 5 but there’s no way I’m going to try using it on anything smaller than the 7.