Summary
For years, my photo editing workflow had one non-negotiable first step: everything went through Adobe Lightroom. It’s what I knew and where my presets lived, and I never questioned whether I needed it for every little edit. Then I actually sat down with Adobe Express, the free app I’d mentally filed under “the Canva competitor,” and realized it was quietly doing most of what I opened Lightroom for anyway. Not the heavy RAW-culling, catalog-managing stuff, but the everyday edits that make up maybe 80 percent of what I do. The adjustments panel is genuinely all there I came for filters and found the sliders I actually use I went into Adobe Express expecting the usual lightweight editing setup: a few filters, brightness and contrast controls, and not much else. Instead, the adjustments panel has most of the sliders I touch when I’m making a quick edit in Lightroom, including highlights, shadows, saturation, warmth, and sharpness. That covers an embarrassingly large chunk of my normal editing. If a phone photo looks a little flat, I’ll usually pull the shadows down, add some contrast, warm it up slightly, and maybe tame the highlights. I can do all of that in Express without feeling like I’m working around the limitations of a basic editor. What surprised me most was that I didn’t really have to change how I edit. The tools are familiar enough that I can open a photo and start moving sliders straight away. I’m not digging through menus trying to figure out what Adobe has renamed exposure or where it has hidden the color controls. Of course, Lightroom still goes much deeper. Express isn’t where I’d go for detailed masking, color grading, lens corrections, or anything that requires precise control over a RAW file. But a lot of my photos never need any of that. Sometimes all I’m trying to do is fix a slightly dull JPEG before sharing it, and opening Lightroom for that now feels unnecessarily heavy. Cropping and resizing feels much less tedious I don’t need to start a Lightroom session for a simple 16:9 crop Cropping is probably one of the least interesting things you can do to a photo, but it’s also something I have to do constantly. Images need to fit different websites, social posts, thumbnails, and screens, and Lightroom was always part of that process mostly because it was already where I edited everything else. Express made me realize how silly that can be when cropping is the only job I actually need to do. I can drop an image in, choose the aspect ratio I want, make a small adjustment, and export it without turning the whole thing into an editing session. Resizing works the same way. If I already like how a photo looks and only need different dimensions, I can sort that out directly instead of importing it into Lightroom, exporting it again, and then potentially opening another tool afterward. It sounds like a small convenience, but these are exactly the kinds of tiny steps that make a workflow feel slower than it needs to be. That’s probably the biggest change Express has made to how I think about editing. I’ve stopped treating every photo like a project. Some images need work, but plenty of others just need a crop, a small exposure tweak, or a different size before they’re done. Background removal is much more useful than I expected This is the kind of edit I’d usually leave Lightroom for anyway The moment Express started making even more sense was when I moved beyond the regular photo adjustments. Lightroom is great at developing photos, but there are plenty of simple jobs where I’d normally have to jump into Photoshop or another app anyway. Removing a background is a good example. Express can cut the subject out of an image automatically, which has been surprisingly handy for quick product shots and images I want to place on a different background. It’s not something I need every day, but when I do need it, being able to handle it in the same browser tab where I made the rest of my edits is much easier than bouncing between apps. I’ve found the object removal tools useful for similar reasons. If there’s a random person in the distance, a distracting object near the edge of the frame, or some clutter I somehow didn’t notice while taking the shot, I can brush over it and see whether Express can clean it up. It doesn’t always get everything right, especially when the background is complicated, so I still check the result closely. But for small distractions, it often does enough that I don’t feel the need to bring the image into a heavier editor. Lightroom still has a very obvious place in my workflow I just stopped using it for jobs that don’t need Lightroom Adobe Express hasn’t replaced Lightroom completely, and I don’t think it could for the way I use Lightroom at its best. If I’ve taken hundreds of photos, I’m working with RAW files, or I need to make detailed selective edits, Lightroom is still the first thing I’m opening. Its catalog, masking tools, presets, and batch-editing workflow are on a completely different level. Plus, I am used to it. What Express has replaced is the reflex to use complicated and advanced tools for absolutely everything. I used to open it even when I knew the photo only needed two minutes of work, simply because that was my routine. Now I’ll usually ask myself what I actually need to change first. If it’s a crop, some basic exposure work, a little warmth, a quick filter, or removing something distracting from the frame, there’s a good chance I’ll just use Express and be finished before Lightroom would have properly entered the picture.