Adobe releases Lightroom Mobile, which lets you sync RAW photos and edit them on the fly using your iPad.
The iPad is an increasingly important tool for professional photographers. And the photography community has long been calling on Adobe to develop an iPad version of its powerful photo editing and organisation app, Lightroom 5.
Problem was, both from a storage and a processing point of view, the iPad isn't the best device for dealing with huge numbers of enormous, RAW files. So with its new Lightroom Mobile app, released today, Adobe's done something quite clever.
It's squared the aforementioned circle by creating a way to edit RAW photos on your iPad without having to actually download them.
Smart Previews
Smart Previews lets you view RAW photos on the iPad without downloading the entire files
Instead, RAW files in Lightroom 5 can be synced between your iPad and desktop via the Creative Cloud. And here's the clever bit: a special 'Smart Previews' feature turns these giant files into much smaller compressed versions that your iPad can handle with aplomb.
While they're compressed, though, the files still contain enough data that they can be usefully edited and manipulated with the Lightroom Mobile app, which contains the crop tool, built-in tone presets and some of the more basic editing tools of Lightroom 5.
Many, if not all, of the editing tools from Lightroom 5 are available in the app
So you can make adjustments to things like the exposure, colour temperature, saturation and so on - and because the files are relatively small, edits are applied almost instantly.
Lossless transfer
Once you're happy with your changes, you can then transfer your edits losslessly back to the original RAW file on your desktop. This also takes place quickly - because all that gets sent via the Cloud is a tiny XML file containing your changes.
Get the Creative Bloq Newsletter
Daily design news, reviews, how-tos and more, as picked by the editors.
Once you've made your edits, Lightroom Mobile syncs them to the original file on your desktop
Adobe says an iPhone version of Lightroom Mobile is coming soon. The company has also launched Lightroom Web, a new way to view and share your images from any web browser. You can check that out here.
Thank you for reading 5 articles this month* Join now for unlimited access
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
