The same thing goes if you regularly merge photographs. If you are the kind of photographer who very regularly needs or wants to use luminosity masks, then using only an iPad just will not work for you. Will Lightroom on the iPad Be All You Need? Selective editing (radial filter, linear filters, and selective brush)Įditing Tools Not Available in Lightroom Mobile.Tone curve (overall and red, green, and blue channels).Light (exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks).

There are a few things that Lightroom Mobile cannot do, though those few things can be quite important for many photographers.

To start, let me just say that almost everything you can do with Lightroom Classic can be done with the mobile version of Lightroom. So, let’s start with what the iPad version of Lightroom (i.e., mobile version of Lightroom) can do. Those limitations just did not affect any of my photos on this particular occasion. Sure, there are things that Lightroom on the iPad cannot do that can be done on a laptop or desktop. The answer to the standing question, is quite simply: 'it depends.' For every photo I took on my trip, editing on the iPad met every need I had. Before diving into the specifics, I am very happy with my purchase, and even though I’ve been home for a couple of weeks, I have not once used my laptop to edit photos – opting instead for my 11' iPad Pro.

At the end of the day, however, I decided against lugging around the heaviest laptop Apple makes in favor of a much lighter and much more portable substitute. I considered bringing my 16” Macbook Pro since I didn’t already have an iPad, and I worried that learning an entirely new Lightroom setup would mean that I could not lean on my established and (what I would consider) efficient workflow. For the first time since COVID-19 hit, I was planning to travel out of the area where I live, and I wanted to be able to back up my photos from my memory card while also being able to cull through them and, if the opportunity arose in my travels, edit some of the photos as well. Before I dive in, trying to answer this question for you, I’ll share what my experience has been like so far.

Using lightroom on ipad