Lightroom, Adobe's professional photo-workflow software, is one of the more intensive desktop applications around, so when the company brought a version to the comparatively horsepower-challenged iPad last April, it obviously couldn't include all its most-powerful features. You might expect to get even less for the iPhone version of Lightroom, but the Lightroom iPhone app (free) actually gets all the same photo editing abilities found in the iPad app. Both apps let you take a pass through a batch of new shots you've imported to Lightroom on the desktop, rate them, and do initial lighting and color adjustments. And, for fun, the app throws in Instagram-style filter effects.

Getting Started with Lightroom on the iPhone
You get the Lightroom iPhone app from the iTunes App Store (it requires iOS 7 or later). The iPad and iPhone versions have separate entries in the app store. Both are a very reasonable sub-45MB download. Before you can do anything with the app, you have to sign in with an Adobe ID. A free account option lets you use the app for locally stored iPhone photos and even gets you 2GB free cloud storage. There's also a free 30-day Creative Cloud trial, but after that you'll need either a full Adobe Creative Cloud subscription ($49.99 a month) or a CC Photography subscription ($9.99 a month) to work with desktop Lightroom files. A subscription gets you access to the full desktop version of Photoshop as well as Lightroom and the mobile apps—among many other excellent Adobe applications.

To work with your D-SLR shots (including raw camera files) in Lightroom for Windows or Mac, you'll need the latest version (Lightroom 5.5). You still have to import images from the camera using the desktop program, and you also have to sign into the same Creative Cloud account on the desktop app so that images sync between the desktop program and the iPhone app.

Key to Lightroom Mobile is a new online service from Adobe that syncs all the editing you do on your pictures across the desktop and mobile apps. The service not only includes syncing, but a Web view of your photos on lightroom.adobe.com. I'm not sure why Adobe didn't stick with its Revel online photo galleries, which are used by other of the company's products, such as Photoshop Elements. Another key is the use of Lightroom's "Smart Previews." These are smaller files that stand in for your large D-SLR raw camera image files, which can easily weigh in at 15 to 30MB. This shrinkage makes it practicable to edit otherwise unwieldy files on a tablet, but when you go back to the photo on the desktop, full resolution is preserved.

App Interface
As you'd expect from the design powerhouse that is Adobe, this iPhone app's interface is easy on the eyes; it also feels fast and makes good use of multitouch gestures. A two-finger tap on the photo toggles between showing photo metadata and a histogram. A three-finger tap-and-hold gesture shows the original image, so, yes, editing is non-destructive. A side-swipe bar across the bottom of the screen offers many of Lightroom's old standby adjustments. Tapping these presents a full-width slider control to raise or lower each setting.

When you first sign into your cloud account, photos don't appear instantly—each photo requires a few seconds of processing before it's visible. A small + at top right lets you create a new collection, to which you can add photos from the Camera Roll. As with so many cloud services of late (Flickr, Dropbox, OneDrive), the app can optionally auto-import everything you shoot with the iPhone to Lightroom Mobile, making the photos accessible on the lightroom.adobe.com website.

Organization options are limited to Pick/Reject flags and star ratings, which you access from the same icon at the bottom. Tapping this button toggles it between a flag and a star. In another interface nicety, swiping up or down on a photo can pick or unpick it, or set the star rating, depending on which option you've set. I'm still disappointed that the app doesn't offer any keyword tagging, and others might miss Lightroom's color coding option. You can, however move photos among collections or simply remove them.

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Editing Digital Photos
Lightroom on the iPhone does offer a generous selection of familiar photo adjusters, including white balance, temperature, tint, auto tone, exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, clarity, vibrance, and saturation. These work just as on the desktop, and they're terrific tools. The app can show a histogram for your photo, but it's not adjustable in any way. Undo and Redo buttons in the lower-right corner are helpful, but when you view the photo later in desktop Lightroom, its History panel of actions performed says only "From Lr mobile."

If you're of the Instagram school of photo editing, you can use the app's preset choices, which include color and black-and-white effects. A General section in this group also offers sharpening, punch, and medium-contrast curve.

What you don't get are the adjustable curves, levels, and lens-profile-based geometry corrections of the desktop Lightroom software. There's no chromatic aberration correction or noise reduction here—even the free Photoshop Express app offers an in-app purchase for noise reduction. Brushes for local edits, like those offered by iPhoto and Snapseed, are also a no-show in the Lightroom app. Perhaps Adobe will adopt the clever technique it uses in its Adobe Mix app in future Lightroom mobile versions, sending images up to the cloud for processing on its powerful servers to achieve cool edits like camera-shake reduction and content-aware fill.

Lightroom on the Web
Lightroom.adobe.com is quite nicely done. Just log in to your Adobe ID and you'll see a simple black background with thumbnails for each of your collections. Click one, and you'll see a Flickr-like justified view of all the collection's images. You can play a slideshow, and even make a collection public and share it to social networks or via a direct URL.

The Lightroom iPhone app does an admirable job of offering powerful Adobe photo correction tools to users on the go. If you already have a Creative Cloud subscription, installing Lightroom on your iPhone is a no-brainer. For even more Photoshop-style editing, check out Apple's iPhoto for iPhone ($4.99) or Nik Software's free Snapseed, both PCMag Editors' Choices.