Skip to main content

Lightroom for iPad briefly appears on Adobe’s website, coming soon with $99/year cloud subscription

Lightroom

Adobe will soon make the iPad an even more viable solution for mobile content creation: the company will soon unleash a version of its popular Lightroom photo editing suite that is optimized for tablets. References to Lightroom for Mobile appeared on Adobe’s official website earlier this week, but they were immediately removed when we contacted Adobe for comment on the yet-to-be-announced product.

Adobe’s tagline for the product is “Take Lightroom anywhere,” but we were unable to locate screenshots of the application on Adobe’s website. The website also does not specifically note iPad support, but a chat representative from Adobe was able to pull up details about Lightroom for Mobile from Adobe’s systems and said that it is built for iPad.

The representative further indicated that the mobile version would largely lineup with the desktop version in terms of features…

adobe-ipad-app

Adobe’s Lightroom software allows photo editors to manage bulks of high-resolution photos, and it is a complement to Adobe’s other products like the full Photoshop suite of applications. Early last year, Adobe demonstrated an early prototype version of the application (shown above). However, it has likely been completely redesigned to go in-line with the new iOS 7 design aesthetic. The application will work with the iPad’s processing power in order to edit RAW files right from a digital SLR camera.

Lightroom Reciept

Besides the ability to manage large photos, one of the marquee features of Lightroom for iPad will be its ability to synchronize via Adobe’s Creative Cloud system with Lightroom on other devices (like a Mac or PC). We understand, that in addition to the Lightroom iPad App Store download, there will be a subscription for syncing Lightroom photos in the cloud. As seen in the top image, this will be a $99 yearly fee. One of our readers was able to actually purchase the subscription earlier this week (see receipt above). It obviously does nothing yet as the app is not available.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVzcicQi00w&w=640&h=360]

The benefit of the $99 service will be that users will not need to store several hundred megabytes or gigabytes of high-resolution photography on the iPad. They can just store it in the cloud or synchronize from their Mac. These photos will still be able to be edited and managed on the iPad, and changes will be synchronized back. Yes, it’s very much like an “iCloud” for Lightroom. A video of the prototype app is above at around 19 minutes in.

With Lightroom briefly appearing this week on Adobe’s website, it is highly likely that an official launch is planned for the coming weeks.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Comments

  1. sardonick - 10 years ago

    99 bucks a year for an iPad app for which I own the full OS X version. No.

  2. myke2241 - 10 years ago

    Yes it makes no sense to me either. i think Adobe is loosing fans and support for either products with the whole CC BS.

  3. Joan Planas - 10 years ago

    Here you have a better video about Lightroom for ipad from 42:00 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yk5JiVby7eQ

  4. Joan Planas - 10 years ago

    better image of Lightroom ipad app: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BeQDD7rCIAA6R4z.png

  5. bricko - 10 years ago

    It needs to be able to just tie to my pc files via wifi….no continued subscription crap. I have lightroom files already set up.

    • Mike Wren - 10 years ago

      With Photosmith for iPad, you can!

      Photosmith is a little project we’ve been working on over the past three years, and it doesn’t rely on the cloud. Your photos and metadata stay on your local network, and costs exactly $0/mo.

      Export to Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Email, right from Photosmith’s catalog.

      Import from your camera via Camera Connection Kit (to photos.app, then import to Photosmith) or directly into Photosmith via FTP or even an Eye-Fi card.

      The forthcoming update to Photosmith will allow folks to render camera raw files right in the app, otherwise importing reference JPG’s into Photosmith, RAW’s into Lightroom, then sync – your JPG metadata in Photosmith finds the associated camera raw files in Lightroom. There’s a lot of workflow options, and we’re really excited Adobe is helping to make photographers aware of the power of iPad for mobile photography beyond Photos.app. :)

      Disclosure: I’m playing for Team Photosmith – I’m open to any questions or comments about the app and mobile photo workflow we’ve helped to create.

  6. James Pharaon - 10 years ago

    They demoed this at Photoshop World (as noted already by Joan Planas). My first question is this: in photography, color correctness and screen calibration is everything. If Adobe wanted to make Lightroom and Photoshop available on tablets and phones, how in the world are you going to calibrate the screen to make sure the images you’re seeing on your Apple, Android or Windows device are accurate? You’d still have to go and verify everything on an actual, calibrated monitor before delivering to a client. Seems like a waste of time and energy to me.