Pretty much every tool in Lightroom Classic goes further – look at the sharpening options, for example, and you can change not only how much sharpening is applied but also how it affects fine detail, the radius of the sharpening applied, and whether a mask is applied. The editing tools are vastly different as well, with Lightroom Classic offering much more powerful versions of the tools that the cloud-based version does.

The cloud version simply isn’t designed to do the same thing. Want to find all the pictures you’ve ever shot at 1/10th of a second? Lightroom Classic makes that easy and near-instant. For instance, you can search for images shot on a particular model of camera, but Lightroom Classic allows you to filter not just by camera body but by lens, or even precise focal length, or aperture, or shutter speed. For example, of course the cloud version of Lightroom allows you to search images via text, in the keyword and caption metadata boxes, but only allows very basic filtering.

If you have a lot of images (my Lightroom library is now touching over 140,000 images, the overwhelming majority of them RAW), the cloud-based version of Lightroom simply doesn’t come close when it comes to navigating and searching very large repositories of photographs. If you can imagine it, you can probably do it here (Image credit: Dave Stevenson) Lightroom Classic offers endless tools for editing.

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