If you’ve been a photographer for a while, there’s a good chance Lightroom Classic has been part of your workflow since day one. It’s powerful, it’s familiar, and it’s been the industry standard for editing RAW photos for years.

But let’s be honest: When it comes to culling, Lightroom Classic can be ... slow. If you’ve ever spent hours clicking through thousands of nearly identical shots trying to pick the best one, you know exactly what I mean. 

In this post, Taylor from the team shares what makes Lightroom Classic great, where it slows us down, and how Narrative can speed up your culling without messing up your editing workflow.

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What is Lightroom Classic?

Lightroom Classic is Adobe’s heavyweight photo editing and organizing tool. It’s the one most of us learned on, and for good reason. It can handle huge libraries, gives you deep control over edits, and has just about every feature you can imagine for managing your photos.

What Lightroom Classic does really well

• Full range of professional editing tools like masking, color grading, and healing

• Integrates with Photoshop and the whole Adobe Creative Cloud

• Works for tethered shooting in a studio setup

• Has endless presets and tutorials online to help you customise your workflow

Where Lightroom Classic struggles

• It isn’t designed for culling, so going through a big shoot is slow

• The interface hasn’t changed much in years and can feel dated

• Large RAW imports can take a while to load and render

• You’ll spend a lot of time doing repetitive manual selection work

Lightroom Classic is still one of the best editing tools out there, but when you need to sort thousands of photos quickly, it can be a real time sink.

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What is Narrative?

Narrative is like that friendly editing assistant who helps you sort through a huge pile of photos in minutes instead of hours. It’s built specifically for culling and it uses AI to do the heavy lifting for you.

You load in your RAW files and Narrative immediately starts looking for things like sharpness, focus, eye contact, and duplicates. By the time you’re ready to look through the images, the AI has already done most of the sorting so you can just pick the best shots and move on.

Why photographers love Narrative

• AI culling that knows what a good photo looks like.

• Sorts by focus, eye, and facial expressions. 

• Starts working as soon as you import, so there’s no long wait.

• Modern, clean interface that makes culling feel easy.

• Perfect for high-volume shoots like weddings, events, and portraits.

• Plays nicely with Lightroom so you can send your selects straight into editing

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Narrative vs Lightroom Classic

I used to think I had to choose between the two. Now I know they’re better together. Narrative takes care of the culling and Lightroom Classic takes care of the editing.

Here’s how I use them in my own workflow:

1. Cull in Narrative
   I load my shoot into Narrative and let the AI do the first pass. I can still make the final decisions, but the hard part is already done.

2. Send to Lightroom Classic
   Once I’ve got my selects, I send them straight into Lightroom. My existing presets are applied as they import.

3. Edit and deliver
   From there I do my detailed edits, retouching, and export the final gallery for my client.

By splitting the work like this, I’ve gone from spending hours culling a big wedding down to less than half the time.

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Which Should You Use?

If you’re using Lightroom Classic for culling, you’re making your life harder than it needs to be. Lightroom is amazing at editing, but it’s just not designed for fast selection work. Narrative is.

The best photographers I know aren’t trying to replace Lightroom. They’re adding Narrative to their workflow so they can spend more time shooting and less time stuck in front of a screen.

Cull smarter with Narrative. Edit confidently with Lightroom Classic.

If you want to see our full comparison video we made - check it out here

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Common Questions from Photographers

Why should I use Narrative instead of Lightroom Classic for culling?
Because Narrative is built for culling. The AI knows what to look for and cuts out the repetitive decision-making.

What exactly is culling?
It’s the process of picking the best shots from a shoot and getting rid of the rest. Good culling saves you hours in editing.

Does Narrative replace Lightroom?
No. Narrative is all about culling. Lightroom is all about editing. They work best together.

Will Narrative work with my camera files?
Yes. It supports most RAW formats and works on both Mac and Windows.

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If you’ve been drowning in RAW files after every shoot, give Narrative a try. I was skeptical at first, but once I saw how much time I was getting back, I couldn’t imagine going back to culling in Lightroom alone.

Try Narrative Free and see what you can do with all that extra time.