This is an area of photo editing that has really moved forward over the past few years, as photographers have shifted their attention from microscopic manipulation towards overall appearance and the expanding range of expressive image styles now available. Photoshop certainly excels and detailed retouching and image manipulation, but it’s not really set up for single-click image ‘looks’ and ‘styles’. Both can carry out routine adjustments, but Lightroom does it much more efficiently.It’s easy to forget in the Photoshop vs Lightroom comparison that although both can do the same things, one is much more efficient than the other. There hardly seems any point in using Photoshop for this, especially as it would mean creating new, often large image files. It’s also fully non-destructive, so you can go back at any time to make adjustments, and you can create Virtual Copies with different adjustments that don’t take up any more disk space. They include exposure, contrast, shadow and highlight recovery and other tonal adjustments, white balance and colour adjustments, lens distortion and aberration correction, perspective correction (see Lightroom CC Geometry panel explained), sensor spot removal and basic object removal, creative color profiles and preset effects, cropping, rotation and more. These are the regular, everyday enhancements that photographers will typically make to photos. We all work in different ways, so this is just my way of looking at the Photoshop vs Lightroom debate. This guide is based around Lightroom Classic, but many of the points will apply to Lightroom too. There are two versions of Lightroom, explained in this Lightroom vs Lightroom Classic article. You can find out more in this article: Adobe Lightroom and Photography Plans explained.īut assuming you have both of these programs, the actual question is which one should you use for each stage of your photo editing workflow, or each particular editing job? There is a lot of crossover between the tools in Photoshop and Lightroom and it’s not immediately obvious which program will be best for what you want to do. If you want both (which is what this article is about) you will need one of the two regular Photography Plans. The Adobe Lightroom (1TB) plan comes only with Lightroom (the web version), not Photoshop. Both the regular Adobe Photography Plan and the Photography Plan (1TB) subscriptions come with both programs. With that in mind, however, I would suggest that Lightroom is more often better than Photoshop. One is not better than the other because it depends on what you want to do. Lightroom vs Photoshop, which is best? It’s not that simple, as anyone who uses them will know, because although there is some crossover (well, a lot of crossover), they have very different roles and very different strengths and weaknesses.

Adobe lightroom vs photoshop cc