Lightroom helps you import, organize, manage, and find your images. In turn, Lightroom is photo management and photo editing, combined into a single tool. All of the edits are automatically kept in your Lightroom catalog, which acts as your database of edits and history. If you shoot raw photos which you should , then I recommend that you first import your photos into Lightroom as the initial step of your image management process.
Lightroom is perfect for most basic photo editing, including but not limited to cropping, white balance, exposure, histogram adjustments, tonal curves, black and white conversion, spot removal, red eye corrections, gradients, local adjustments, sharpening, noise reduction, lens profile corrections, vibrance, and saturation.
Lightroom is also much easier to use than Photoshop, which can have more of a steep learning curve. When it comes to workflow, I believe Lightroom blows Photoshop out of the water. With Lightroom, you can create collections, add keywords, move multiple images or files around your hard drive, create slideshows, print books, and share your photos directly to Facebook with relative ease.
As importantly, you can also copy or sync your photo edits to multiple photos at once. You can also use and create Lightroom presets to apply common settings across your photos. Depending on the type of photography you do, this can be fairly often or practically never. That being said, there are a few specific areas where Photoshop actions and Photoshop elements that outperform Lightroom. Advanced Retouching: If you want to have pixel level control to edit photos, or if you want to make an arm thinner or a person taller, Photoshop is needed.
Composites: When you want to slice and dice a couple of images to create a single awesome image, Photoshop is your answer. HDR: Although there are some great HDR plugins available for Lightroom Photomatix , if you want to blend images together to pull out the highlights and shadows from multiple exposures, Photoshop can do this.
Note: Lightroom does this as well, but with different effect. Lightroom includes a cataloguing system designed to import and organize photos.
I can import all the images from my SD card, keyword them, and rate the quality. I can even apply my favourite image adjustments automatically. I can move and organize the photos to make them easier to find later. A separate program, Adobe Bridge , is in the Creative Cloud suite to bridge the gap.
This program includes the cataloguing, import, and export features included in Lightroom. But the editing tool is limited compared with Lightroom. Photoshop has another limitation when importing images from my camera. This program allows raw files to be opened in Photoshop. You can make basic photo editing adjustments in both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. But the workspace and the user experience is very different. The Lightroom workspace makes basic photo edits like exposure and color adjustments easy.
Thus, simplifying the workspace. Photoshop is more than capable of making basic photo adjustments. Photographers working in Photoshop often use ACR to do basic adjustments. Selecting a photo from Bridge will send the file to ACR. Each change you make is baked into the image. Using Lightroom is non-destructive. Edits are saved in a sidecar file and never change the original photo.
Photographers using Photoshop often create new layers for each major change. This way, they can go back to the original image if they need to. This system tends to increase file size. Plus, I use Lightroom to batch edit images. This means that you can easily apply edits from one photo to other images. By advanced image edits, I mean changing the pixels in the photo. This can be anything from removing a dust spot to replacing a boring sky. Lightroom includes some basic content manipulation tools.
There is a spot remover and a transform tool that lets you adjust perspective. Newer versions of Lightroom include basic merge tools. These allow photographers to create HDR images and panoramas. Lightroom added soft-proofing back in , but it only supports soft-proofing on RGB devices — like inkjet printers. Photoshop offers far more powerful soft-proofing tools.
First released in rather hamstrung form in , Photoshop for iPad has grown impressively with time, and now offers a pretty full-on set of tools. Layers, subject selection, brushes are all included, as well as interoperability with PSD files from the desktop version of Photoshop. If you want to start with a decent photograph, spend a few minutes editing it, and then export the final piece, Lightroom makes outstandingly light work of most mainstream photo editing jobs.
The closest photographers had to a proper cataloguing application for years was Bridge, which instantly became second-best when Lightroom came along.
From there, you can sort images by folder, or you can arrange images into virtual collections for easy recall. Lightroom also makes searching via metadata easy — if you want to find all images shot on a particular camera, or lens, or aperture value, or shutter speed the list goes on for quite some time — you can do so in seconds. Once you get in the habit of keywording and captioning your images, Lightroom is also incredibly quick at plain text searches, so you can quickly find the images you tagged with a name, or a place, and so on.
This almost-instant recall of images — particularly once you get your Lightroom catalogue into the hundreds of thousands — is incredibly valuable and a real time-saver. Lest we forget, Lightroom also edits images. Photoshop can automate certain jobs courtesy of the Actions tool, but nothing soars through repetitive processing or exporting work like Lightroom. You want 2, pictures all set to the same white balance?
Lightroom can do that. Lightroom can do that, too. Without a shadow of a doubt, whether or not you want to use Lightroom to edit your images, you should absolutely be using it for cataloguing and organizing your library. To that end, Lightroom provides a graceful way of round-tripping an image to Photoshop — right-click an image, choose 'Edit in Photoshop' and your shot will be exported and opened in Photoshop, as a PSD where you can edit it as normal.
Of course, you can always open your PSD Photoshop file later to continue editing it.
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