Interesting, I do all my editing for my work in lightroom classic on my office machine. Still, the app is continually updated and as it’s a subscription model they do have some incentive to keep adding features, especially as upstarts like serif/affinity start encroaching on their space.

On the desktop I use LR classic, not CC (cloud version) as I have many terabytes worth of photos and I’m not about to pay cloud storage to adobe for that. I find their cloud syncing system clunky and sometimes buggy. I want full metadata editing (and batch editing of metadata) and it won’t do that (yet). That being said I do have a few gripes with the mobile application: Bad export support - I want to be able to export full size TIFF files. I have no problem with that as the cost is minimal compared to every other cost in professional photography. It’s a great application but it does require adobe’s subscription. If you need to do a deep dive and heavy retouching on individual images, though, you’re often better off in Affinity or Photoshop. This is why lightroom has great built in batch adjustment and keyword capabilities. This is why lightroom is built on a library structure. That means you dump everything from your session into lightroom and you use the app primarily to organize, rate, cull rejects and fine tune your hero images from that shoot. However from my perspective lightroom is primarily designed as a shoot editor. For a great number of people LR will handle all your needs and there’s no reason to do further work in Affinity or PS. To clarify yes, lightroom’s individual image editing features are continually getting better and more robust. I feel it’s important to distinguish between a photo editing application (photoshop proper, affinity photo) and a shoot editingapplication such as lightroom.

Pro photographer here who does 90% of his work on the iPad these days.

Lightroom for ipad free