It's too confusing, with contradictory statements. "Lightroom Classic CC 7.0 (the new name the folder-based version of Lightroom)..." What is "folder-based"? I don't recall seeing that term before. Does it mean cloud-based? Why confuse things with "Classic"? Was the previous CC version called LR 6?

Apparently, support for the stand-alone LR 6 will continue till the end of the year. After that, people buying new cameras might want to select one of the many alternatives to LR.

It's really very simple, and it is a technique I used a lot when cameras had less dynamic range than they do now.

If you take a picture of a scene that has a range of contrast that is beyond the cameras ability to record, you have four choices.

1. You can use a middle value for exposure, ensuring that most of the image is properly exposed. In high contrast scenes, the highlights will "blow out", often resulting in areas of detail-less white, and muddy, noisy shadows.

2. You can preserve the highlights, by exposing for them in such a way that they are not "blown out" but very close to being so. Looking at the camera's histogram will show a graph on the back of the camera that indicates where the values of the recorded image are, and the highlights, which are on the right, come right up to the right edge without "clipping" them or blowing them out. You can also turn on the camera's highlight warning to show you any blown highlights as blinking areas. This is fine for some shots, but they will typically render an image darker, which will require some post processing to raise the tonal values of the darker areas, and possibly clean up the noise in those areas differently than you would in the higher tones.

3. You can shoot for the shadows, increasing the exposure that you might normally use so that they are recorded with detail and lower noise. The resulting image may appear a bit lighter, and the highlights will most certainly be blown out.

3. You can use bracketed exposure. This uses all three of the above exposure techniques - and uses software that is able to create a tone mask for specific ranges of tonal values, and just using the best areas of exposure for each range of tonal values, and merging the various masks into a single image.

This is all fine and good, but bracketing has some serious limitations. If anything moves during the three shot capture, it will be blurry in the final image, so it works best with images of static subjects, and worst when there is lots of movement like tree leaves moving in the wind, active human or animal subjects etc.

When it is appropriate, you can make stunning images with very wide dynamic range without the clipping at the extremes (shadows and highlights) that can happen when using just a single exposure. With dynamic ranges on the newer cameras you get dynamic range of 12 stops or more, so there is less of a need to do bracketing. But sometimes you need to do it.

A church interior with gorgeous stained glass windows, waterfalls where the sun is shining on the bright white falling water, and the rest is in shadow, and even a day with an overcast sky, are times when bracketing can help.

Here is one of my early experiments with bracketed shots I took in 2007.

The first was exposed for the sky, letting darker tones fall where they may. Second was exposed for midtones, and much of the sky is clipped, blown out. The third is exposed for shadows, all of the sky is completely and irrevocably lost. The last image is a merged file of the prior three. I used Lightroom's 'Merge to HDR" to quickly create the merged image, with a little bit of adjusting for tonal values and I knocked down the saturation of the sky a bit.

Trying to get all that tonal value in one shot and hoping that post processing can fix the over and underexposed areas was most definitely beyond the capabilities of cameras and software 10 yrs ago. That is the piece you may be missing.

While the subject matter is not great, the setting it good for an illustration of when one might use bracketing and how it works.

Topaz Studio can be downloaded for FREE and is definitely worth trying - works great on RAW and JPEG files, and for a small fee you can add a bunch of useful plugin modules (that Topaz calls "adjustments"), i.e., you can customize the program based on your photo-editing needs and don't have to pay for all kinds of functions for which you have no use.

A PRO edition can be purchased that includes all these adjustments. The program also works seamlessly with all the Topaz modules, e.g., Topaz Impressions, DeNoise, and many others. There really is no good reason to pay for a photo-editing program without first trying Topaz Studio.