Its primary uses include importing, saving, viewing, organizing, tagging, editing, and sharing large numbers of digital images.

[6] Lightroom's editing functions include white balance, presence, tone, tone curve, HSL, color grading, detail, lens corrections, and calibration manipulation, as well as transformation, spot removal, red eye correction, graduated filters, radial filters, and adjustment brushing.

[clarification needed] Lightroom can store and organize photos once imported into the platform database, and is currently compatible with TIFF, JPEG, PSD (Photoshop), PNG, CMYK (edited in RGB color space) and raw image formats.

The three Lightroom variations differ in how they store images and interact with Adobe's cloud storage offering, and in their feature sets.

[16] Hamburg contacted Andrei Herasimchuk, former interface designer for the Adobe Creative Suite, to start the project.

Herasimchuk chose to leave Adobe Systems at that time to start a Silicon Valley design company.

On June 26, 2006, Adobe announced that it had acquired the technology of Pixmantec, developers of the Rawshooter image processing software.

[21][22] Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic CC (unofficially: version 7.0) was officially released on October 18, 2017.

Once the user stops paying the monthly fee, the program will be limited to viewing existing catalogs, without the ability to apply further changes to images.