Top pick
In both its free and paid modes, Lightroom stands out for its huge range of adjustments, high-quality output, and excellent library-style file organization.
Adobe Lightroom (Android, iPhone, iPad) is not just the most powerful mobile photo editing app we’ve tested—it’s also the most flexible, and the app that provides the most generous free mode. Its range of adjustments is unmatched, and the photos it produces often (but not always) look noticeably better than the results you can get from other editors. It’s fast, even on generations-old hardware, and its library system lets you easily pick up an editing project days, weeks, or months later.
To unlock the full features of the app, you pay $5 per month, but if you’re willing to pay double that for a pricey Adobe subscription plan, you also get a terabyte of cloud storage and the ability to easily edit your smartphone photos on your computer and vice versa. In comparison with apps that focus on filters over more granular adjustments, such as Instagram or VSCO, Lightroom comes with both a steeper price and a more difficult learning curve. Those other apps may be easier for newbies to jump into, but Lightroom is a better app to grow with.
Overall, Lightroom produced the best-looking photos in our side-by-side tests. It was the most successful at lifting shadows in severely underexposed photos, able to claw back detail and color data in nearly pitch-black areas of JPEGs. Competitors such as Snapseed produced dimmer and less detailed results. That said, Lightroom doesn’t always make the best use of its abilities. Its autofix algorithm often brightens shadows too much—and then over-applies contrast and saturation in its effort to make up for how washed-out the lifted areas are. In general, we suggest skipping autofix in any photo editor and taking the time to tweak shadows, saturation, and contrast yourself.
Most of Lightroom’s myriad tools are available for free, including almost all of the most important, everyday edits. In addition to core settings like exposure, contrast, and saturation, Lightroom allows free users access to more technical tools like curves, noise reduction, and dehaze. Lightroom is also the only editor we tested that includes smartphone lens profiles that can automatically adjust for the distortion and vignetting caused by each specific phone or tablet camera. In addition, it includes profiles for popular DSLR and mirrorless lenses, so you can edit those files on your phone or tablet just as you would on a computer.
In 2024, Adobe added a few AI-based tools to Lightroom Mobile: Lens Blur, Quick Actions, and Generative Remove. In each case, you must have a data connection because the AI-based processing needs to reference a server to make the edit happen.
Generative Remove is only available to subscribers and lets you choose whether to use the Generative-AI version of the tool or the older version. In our test removing some painted writing on a complex textured surface, the AI version did a significantly better job of making an edit that was not noticeable at all, blending in perfectly. Quick Actions is currently available as early access (it’s unclear if this will eventually move behind a paywall) and uses AI to detect your subject, background, or sky and apply adjustments including brightness, saturation, or a handful of presets to only those areas. Lens Blur is available to free users and did a good job of adding blur to portions of our test photo, but doesn’t have a non-AI option.
Lightroom’s smartphone layout will be familiar to anyone who has used the desktop version, but novices may face a bit of a learning curve. Individual adjustments are nested inside expanding submenus represented by a row of icons across the bottom of the edit screen (or the right side, in landscape orientation). For example, the Light submenu includes adjustments for exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks, plus curves. For the most part, these groupings and the order in which they’re presented make sense, and the user interface does a decent job of staying out of the way and giving your photos room.
Similar to how most editing apps work, in Lightroom you press and hold a dot and move it along a slider to change brightness, contrast, and other settings. But unlike other apps, Lightroom lets you bump the adjustment in tiny increments by tapping left or right of the dot, and it also allows you to reset the adjustment to zero by double-tapping on the dot. Most people are probably fine with pressing and dragging, but those who are more particular about their tweaks will appreciate the granularity these micro-adjustments provide.
Whereas most other editing apps open photos directly from your device’s camera roll, Lightroom requires you to import them into its library. The primary drawback to this approach is that it creates a duplicate of every photo edit, which takes up a lot of extra storage. If you have a newer phone that includes 64 GB of storage or more, you may not feel the pinch, but if you have an older device, you may run into trouble.
On the other hand, thanks to the library setup, Lightroom can keep a full history of your adjustments, slider positions included, even if you leave midway through an editing session. If you come back later and don’t like the edits you made, you can jump to any point in the edit history or even wipe it and revert to the original photo in a couple of taps. Other apps we tested don’t provide nearly as much flexibility. Lightroom also allows for better organization: You can create your own albums; sort all images by import, capture, or last-modified date; and filter the results to show only flagged, tagged, or highly rated shots (among other criteria).
For $5 a month or $50 annually, you can upgrade to the premium version of the app to unlock healing and masking tools, more presets, perspective adjustments, raw-file editing, and more. Adobe also offers two subscription plans that include cloud storage and the ability to use Lightroom on both mobile and desktop devices, each priced at $12 per month. The Lightroom plan includes both the mobile and desktop versions of the app along with 1 TB of cloud storage, which Adobe says is good for approximately 20,000 raw files or 200,000 JPEGs. The Photography plan includes Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop but offers only 20 GB of cloud storage (enough for approximately 4,000 JPEGs). Both plans unlock all of the mobile app’s premium features including the ability to share via an online web gallery, so you don’t have to pay for a hosting service like Flickr or Smugmug.
Lightroom on the iPad is another attractive proposition for photographers who need to make quick edits in the field. The app has native support for the Apple Pencil and other styluses, including pressure sensitivity, so the harder you press, the stronger it applies the selected adjustment. If you’ve used a Wacom tablet in the past, the experience is similar, though even the iPad Pro has many fewer levels of sensitivity than a standard Wacom tablet. Alternatively, you can use your finger, but it’s less precise than the pointy end of a stylus.
Note that Lightroom has the best built-in camera of all the editing apps we’ve tested, but we don’t think it’s worth switching away from your phone’s default camera app for everyday shooting. Despite its ample features, it can’t tap into the legitimately cool extras that recent Apple and Android devices include, such as portrait mode and studio lighting.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
Lightroom’s biggest flaw is that it can be intimidating for those who are new to photography. The interface doesn’t do much hand-holding, assuming you already know terms like exposure, luminance, clarity, and masking. In other words, it provides more options and thus more depth than less technical editors like Snapseed, but at the cost of a more challenging learning curve. However, the app does offer helpful interactive tutorials that guide you step-by-step through specific actions, from rescuing an overexposed photo to creating more dramatic portraits with masking tools.
The app is expensive if you want or need its premium features. Most people can happily get by with the free version, but if raw-file editing, healing brushes, selective editing, cloud storage, and cross-device syncing are important to you, the full Adobe experience costs $12 per month or $120 per year. Compared with the pricing of other editing apps, that’s a huge investment—but then again, no other app provides the same array of features that Lightroom does.
Lightroom requires you to create an Adobe account or to log in via Facebook, Google, or Apple even if you are using only its free features.
Finally, the free filters (“presets” in Adobe parlance) included in Lightroom are fairly traditional photographic looks such as “vivid” or “cool light,” as opposed to the more dynamic offerings of other editing apps we’ve considered. Think of these filters as useful starting points for a certain look but not the kind you’d want to just slap on and post straight to Instagram. That said, the paid version of the app unlocks a plethora of presets and an AI tool that offers recommendations based on your image.
