Today’s Question: My Adobe Creative Cloud subscription upgrade says Lightroom CC 2015. You call it Lightroom 6, but my program says 5.7.1. Why this confusion?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The latest version of Lightroom is referred to both as Lightroom 6 and Lightroom CC, depending on whether you purchased a standalone license for the software or subscribed via the Creative Cloud, respectively. If you’re seeing a version number earlier than 6, that indicates you’ve not yet installed (or aren’t properly running) Lightroom 6.
More Detail: It sounds like you have found Lightroom CC (aka Lightroom 6) within the Creative Cloud application, which is how you can install this latest version. If you haven’t yet installed Lightroom CC, you can simply click the “Install” button within the Creative Cloud application to have the new version installed.
I suspect in this case you may very well have installed Lightroom CC, but you’re still running Lightroom 5. This is a common source of confusion, because installing a “full” upgrade version of Lightroom (such as from version 4 to 5, or from version 5 to 6) isn’t actually updating your existing installation. Instead, a completely new copy of Lightroom is installed.
In other words, when you install Lightroom CC (version 6) you’ll still have Lightroom 5 installed on your computer. Once you’ve upgraded your Lightroom 5 catalog for use in Lightroom 6 (which again will make a full copy of the catalog rather than replacing your existing catalog), you will want to be sure to launch Lightroom 6 rather than Lightroom 5.
For example, you may want to create a new shortcut for Lightroom 6 to replace any shortcuts for Lightroom 5, to be sure you’re always running the latest version of the software. And once you have Lightroom 6 up and running and have confirmed everything is working properly, you can uninstall Lightroom 5 from your computer.