Apple on Thursday announced that Adobe Lightroom is now available in the Mac App Store. An app for creative professionals who work in photography, Lightroom comes with a full set of tools for managing thousands upon thousands of photos, as well as editing tools for retouching and fine-tuning.
There’s no difference between the MAS version of Lightroom and Adobe’s version that you get directly from the company; the features are the same. Like the Adobe-sold version, the MAS version is sold as subscription-based software after a 7-day free trial. After that, it’s $9.99 per month, which puts you in Adobe’s Lightroom plan that includes 1TB of Creative Cloud file storage and access to the mobile and web versions of Lightroom.
If you buy through Adobe, you can pay the same $9.99 per month for the same Lightroom plan, or you can choose Adobe’s $9.99 per month Photography plan, which includes access to Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Adobe Photoshop, but with only 20GB of Creative Cloud file storage. Adobe also has a plan for $52.99 per month ($19.99 per month for students and teachers) for access to all of Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps.
Adobe stopped doing traditional sales of Lightroom in 2017. When Adobe released Lightroom CC, it made the app subscription-only.
Adobe doesn’t make most of its apps available in Apple’s MAS. Currently, the only other Adobe app available is Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019. According to this Adobe FAQ, Adobe once sold version 4 of Lightroom through the MAS.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor
Roman has covered technology since the early 1990s. His career started at MacUser, and he's worked for MacAddict, Mac|Life, and TechTV.