Info Centre
Purchasing Lightroom and Photoshop
Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop can only be purchased on a subscription basis with a monthly or yearly payment. Adobe call these Creative Cloud Plans and there are 2 options show below.
| Plan Name | Adobe's Description | Price as of July 2025 | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lightroom | Edit photos in one click with powerful presets, share from anywhere and store up to 1TB. | £11.99/mo inc VAT | This is is suitable for members who wish to start using Lightroom to store their images and perform many post processing operations on those images.Whilst the 1TB of cloud storage could be useful for security and to save on local disk space, most existing club members do not use it (It used to be a separate purchase) |
| Photography | Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop on desktop, web, iPhone and iPad and 1 TB of cloud storage. | £19.97/mo inc VAT | This is suitable for members who have a lot of experience in Post-Processing and wish to learn Photoshop to perform more sophisticated operations on their images. Note that if you want to use Generative AI in Photoshop, you only have 25 credits per month, ie you can use it 25 times in a month. See later for more information on Generative AI. |
To purchase one or other of the two plans, go to https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/plans.html and scroll down to find the correct plan, then click on "Buy Now". You will be offered the opportunity to sign up for monthly or yearly payments; the latter saves a little money. However, if you cancel, you cannot get a refund for outstanding months.
After purchase, Adobe should offer a download link for you to download and install the Creative Cloud Application. This is like a Control Panel for your PC/Mac and it gives you the opportunity to download Lightroom Classic and Photoshop and in the future, to download updates. This is the advance of the Adobe subscription - you get updates that comprise bug fixes and new features, as well as technical support if required.
For reference, this link takes you to a page to download Creative Cloud - https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/apps/download-install-apps/creative-cloud-apps/download-creative-cloud-desktop-app-from-web.html
Once Adobe Creative Cloud has been installed, run it and you will see a dashboard advertising Adobe's products. Click on "Apps" on the veritical menu bar on the left hand side. Each Adobe Application is shown in a box - look for the one called "Lightroom Classic" and install that. DO NOT install the one called "Lightroom" as that does not have all of the facilities of Classic, and you will not be easily supported by other club members. If you purchased Photoshop, you can install it from here also.
Generative AI Credits
Each time you user Generative Expand or Generative Fill in Photoshop it uses one of your credits. If you are going to be a frequent user of Generative AI you will need to purchase extra credits. The only way to do this is to subscribe to Adobe Firefly Standard which gives you 2,000 credits per month for £9.98/mo. This can be purchased on the Adobe plans web page as shown earlier on this page.