Why Lightroom if I have PS?

[Brian K]

Why would I need Lightroom if I already have photoshop? Aren't they some what redundant? And if not what does Lightroom do best as compared to PS?

[Valdecus]

LR is better for managing large amount of photos, and it is easier when printing or making web galleries. PS is best for working with a single image and whenever you need layers for special pixel based image manipulation.

Cheers,
Andreas

[bob carnie]

I use both on a daily basis-

Lightroom is for looking at work, selection process, and quick export to a printer for proofing. I find it invaluable to synchronize , colour tints, sharpening , rotations, then export and apply profile, size and ppi settings to my printer for output .
If you have large archives or are creating a lot of images, Lightroom is critical for archiving. One note of caution, even though it is considered a easy program to learn, there is a steep learning curve at the beginning to make sure you know how to bring in the work properly.


PS is what I use for editing files, it has more power , but is not as easy to master as Lightroom.
I am upgrading from CS3 and Lightroom 2 right now to CS6 and Lightroom 6. Actually taking a Bootcamp in Atlanta on CS6 to learn what I skipped over in more advance classes.
All my final work is from Photoshop and all final adjustments, curves, Dodge and Burn and Sharpening is done here.


IMO they are both excellent tools with very different application or uses . I know some who only use Lightroom and also some who only use PS. Kelby training is a great resource to learn more about how they can work together which is how I like to use them.

[Ken Lee]

Let's say you typically shoot weddings with a digital camera. You might make several thousand shots during a single shoot - which need to be cataloged, indexed, and color-corrected en masse. Redundant operations on a large number of small photos, inside a database engine: Lightroom The tools use readily graspable terms, like "Brighten" and "Shadows".

At the other end of the spectrum is someone who shoots comparatively few but large files, treats each one individually, and needs the entire toolset: Photoshop. The tools use more technical terms, like "Layer Mask".

As part of Adobe's Creative Suite, Photoshop is used by designers, not just photographers. Lightroom is for digital photographers.

[bdkphoto]

The most significant difference is that Lightroom is a parametric image editor - non-destructive changes to your files throughout LR, all you are changing is the instruction sets not the files themselves. I use LR as my primary image editor, and only when I need to do pixel based retouching do I open the files in PS. LR & PS are well integrated so you have the best of both worlds, including the image library and the other modules. Editing is much simpler in LR as well.I just downloaded LR 4.1 this morning, and the update is great- a nice improvement in the develop module for exposure/highlight/shadow along with some nice tools for fixing CA. I've become a big fan of LR.

[mdm]

Lightroom is a lot more annoying than photoshop and it will take over your drive because it indexes all the images in its database, if you want to edit outside of it or do anything you have to export the file. Its also a good excuse for adobe to milk a little more out of you. No longer can you just open a file and edit it outside of lightroom, neither can you move files or delete junk or horrors, whole directories. If you have got this far without it you are unlikely to benefit by using it. (If you are not going to invest in PS or other editors then LR is a good way to get a 16 bit editor and some useful sharpening tools similar to PK sharpener, I am also probably ignorant and badly informed.)

[Valdecus]

(If you are not going to invest in PS or other editors then LR is a good way to get a 16 bit editor and some useful sharpening tools similar to PK sharpener, I am also probably ignorant and badly informed.)

Yes.

[bdkphoto]

Lightroom is a lot more annoying than photoshop and it will take over your drive because it indexes all the images in its database, if you want to edit outside of it or do anything you have to export the file. Its also a good excuse for adobe to milk a little more out of you. No longer can you just open a file and edit it outside of lightroom, neither can you move files or delete junk or horrors, whole directories. If you have got this far without it you are unlikely to benefit by using it. (If you are not going to invest in PS or other editors then LR is a good way to get a 16 bit editor and some useful sharpening tools similar to PK sharpener, I am also probably ignorant and badly informed.)

Almost everything you wrote is incorrect.

[David A. Goldfarb]

It seems I can do a lot of non-destructive batch editing using Bridge and ACR and further batch editing by defining actions in CS5. It took some time to figure out how to do that, but I did it mainly to end my dependence on Canon's editor for batch operations, since I knew that Photoshop could produce a higher quality result. Maybe these things are more intuitive in Lightroom--I haven't tried--but having figured them out in Photoshop, I'm not sure I need more software.

[Ed Richards]

I use Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS6. I scan my 4x5 after I process it and save a small JPG and a full size TIFF. The JPGs are filed as an index of all the shots - my version of the old notebooks of contact sheets. I only keep the good TIFF files, which I then edit to final form in PS as I get time. I also shoot digital for stuff that moves and family photos. I have about 2200 scanned negatives on file, and a smaller number of TIFF and PS files for keepers. Current versions of Lightroom index the files where they are on your harddrive.Nothing is imported or moved. This was not true of the first version, which was a nightmare to use. I use Lightroom to view and sort files and to generate my WWW galleries:

http://www.epr-art.com

I do not edit LF files in Lightroom. I do use it to covert PS files to 8 bit TIFF for printing, then I delete the print files when I am done. (I feed the TIFF files to Qimage for printer control and final sharpening.) I do almost all my digital processing in Lightroom, with various plugins.

If you are doing a hybrid workflow, and shoot much, you need some sort of image management system. Lightroom is a good one. If you also shoot some digital, it is essential to have an image manager. Aperture probably OK, if your in the Apple cult, but I am sure it does not integrate as well with PS. If I really knew how to use Lightroom, I could probably do the same processing in it as in PS - it has burn and dodge tools, and retouching tools. I do not do much manipulation beyond adjusting perspective if I did not have the camera completely level, burning and dodging with masks, sharpening, and adjusting local contrast, all in black and white. I think you could probably do all of this in Lightroom, saving the cost of PS. I have been very pleased with the program.

If you want a WWW presence, and are not WWW whiz, Lightroom has tools for doing simple WWW sites and for uploading to commercial hosting sites. It is probably the easiest way to get LF images on the WWW.

[Brian K]

Thanks for the replies all. I decided to purchase LR. As I am now a contributor to a stock agency and will be shooting some reasonably high res digital (nikon800E) on my trips it looks like I'll need something that is more organized. When all i was producing was 10 images a year PS was more than sufficient. Now there will be vastly more images.

With scanned images though, do you first run them through LR for basic corrections like sharpness and levels, and save PS for layers and clean up?

[welly]

With scanned images though, do you first run them through LR for basic corrections like sharpness and levels, and save PS for layers and clean up?

Pretty much. Even spotting/de-scratching images can be done pretty well in LR. The Spot Removal tool is quite accurate so you can probably do most of it there and any final cleaning in Photoshop.

[Frank Petronio]

Gee I open my scans up in Bridge/ACR and do editing there before Photoshop... it is less destructive I think, seems to work well.

I've had LR 4.1 sitting on my drive for a while now and haven't gotten into it because it has an entirely different look and feel than Photoshop and even the other CS apps... it's like its own little world unto itself. Why it couldn't be integrated to be as consistent as InDesign-Illustrator- and Photoshop are is a puzzle, especially considering that Adobe charge a premium price and has a huge user base. You'd think that after cramming CS "integration" down our throats that they'd at least drink their own KoolAid and make LR look like PS.

End of rant - we all know Adobe has us by the short hairs and they are not a customer-focused company. They want to charge the most they can for the smallest amount of work that goes into an upgrade, so they churn out some bells and whistles while leaving the boring UI and performance issues to whenever they get around to it or they become so awful they break.

Before I truly start using LR I want to first determine a really good-for-my-lifetime file naming strategy and what I want in my file's metadata. And then I want to reorganize my hard drives and existing file organization so if LR indexes everything then I'm able to do it once and not be changing things around and screwing up LR six months from now. Then I think it will be great to get everything into it, all of my existing and future work. The one advantage of it being Adobe is the huge user base will prevent it from becoming completely obsolete as quickly as the small Mom-and-Pop apps.

[Mark Barendt]

I've tried LR four times, abandoned it in short order four times too.

[bob carnie]

Brian - I still use PS for those purposes. Sharpening is always in PS

Thanks for the replies all. I decided to purchase LR. As I am now a contributor to a stock agency and will be shooting some reasonably high res digital (nikon800E) on my trips it looks like I'll need something that is more organized. When all i was producing was 10 images a year PS was more than sufficient. Now there will be vastly more images.

With scanned images though, do you first run them through LR for basic corrections like sharpness and levels, and save PS for layers and clean up?

[Kirk Gittings]

(If you are not going to invest in PS or other editors then LR is a good way to get a 16 bit editor and some useful sharpening tools similar to PK sharpener, I am also probably ignorant and badly informed.)

In terms of Lightroom?......totally.....

[Kirk Gittings]

Brian, I use both for nearly all my my work, b&w scanned images and digital capture. I vastly prefer the filing system and basic image editing tools in LR but end up taking about half my digital capture files into PS and all my scanned images into PS for further work.

[mdm]

Not totally. The output sharpening in LR is straight from PK sharpener and the PK sharpener guys had major input into its sharpening tools, though I dont see any creative sharpening tools, the workflow of multiple pass and purpose dependant sharpening is from PK sharpening.
Lets say you scan a negative using epson scan or vuescan, to edit it in LR it must be imported, nothing LR does is applied to the file, it just keeps a record of what you did (so it uses less room than PS) but lets say you prefer to do something in another editor. To get your file to the other editor it must be exported, so the other editor can see your adjustments. Say you are used to opening files directly in whatever editor you like, does not work with LR. To use LR you must accept that it is the bedrock of your workflow, you cant live without it. It takes over your drive and you must live within its walls and use only the front door. Clearly its not a bad place to be judging by the number of people who like it, I have tried it again but I still dont love it. Shurely it is a 16 bit editor, it understands my 16 and 48 bit tiffs. Perhaps you are a worn out professor, but try putting your cap back on and backing up your argument with facts.

[Kirk Gittings]

Well not really. It is far more flexible than that. For example you don't have to officially export a file into PS you can just open it with LR edits applied-like flattening adjustment layers in PS. Its not all that complicated. Also I sometimes work from Bridge, opening a scanned file directly into PS then save it to a LR folder. It can live there (invisible to LR) or I can always find it there with Bridge or Finder or I can simply Synchronize that folder in LR and it will be imported and visible in LR-very simple and elegant.

What do you mean it "takes over your hard drive"? Nothing it does IME fits that description at all. I have many external hard drives that have both LR catalogued files and ones that are not.

[welly]

Not totally. The output sharpening in LR is straight from PK sharpener and the PK sharpener guys had major input into its sharpening tools, though I dont see any creative sharpening tools, the workflow of multiple pass and purpose dependant sharpening is from PK sharpening.
Lets say you scan a negative using epson scan or vuescan, to edit it in LR it must be imported, nothing LR does is applied to the file, it just keeps a record of what you did (so it uses less room than PS) but lets say you prefer to do something in another editor. To get your file to the other editor it must be exported, so the other editor can see your adjustments. Say you are used to opening files directly in whatever editor you like, does not work with LR. To use LR you must accept that it is the bedrock of your workflow, you cant live without it. It takes over your drive and you must live within its walls and use only the front door. Clearly its not a bad place to be judging by the number of people who like it, I have tried it again but I still dont love it. Shurely it is a 16 bit editor, it understands my 16 and 48 bit tiffs. Perhaps you are a worn out professor, but try putting your cap back on and backing up your argument with facts.

It's not too difficult to create a virtual copy of the image you're working on and exporting that to work on externally as opposed to the original file, which wouldn't be touched. You create your virtual copy and export it as a TIF or PSD with the Lightroom processing applied to it so it'll export your image with any changes you've made in Lightroom, and then you edit that in Photoshop or MS Paint.

You then have your original image, a virtual copy of your original image which has non-destructive amends to it that can be reversed or additional work added to it and then you've exported a TIF/PSD file with your amends applied that can be edited in whatever your external tool of choice is. It's pretty flexible really and not that much of an effort to export your image.

Plus, I find working with Lightroom to manage (and find) my images far, far more efficient than using Finder (on my Mac) to dig through all my images. Horses for courses and all that though.

Sure, in some ways if you start using Lightroom, you're kind of tied into a Lightroom workflow but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

[mdm]

Oh well, thats fair enough. It does use much less room than PS layered tiffs.

[Valdecus]

Shurely it is a 16 bit editor, it understands my 16 and 48 bit tiffs. Perhaps you are a worn out professor, but try putting your cap back on and backing up your argument with facts.
You are mixing up bit depth definitions. LR edits are done in a 16-bit/channel RGB mode, i.e. 48 bits in total. It is capable of working on 8-bit/channel (24-bit) files, 16-bit/channel (48-bit) files, as well as 32-bit Floating Point TIFF files (since version 4.2).

Cheers,
Andreas

[Richard A Johnson]

Here's a question, I am under the impression that Lightroom is for use with mainly digital files. If you shoot large format b&w neg's as I do, and scan them into PS, will LR invert them for you to a positive so you can start to edit? OR do you have to do your inverting and setting of levels first before you can import?

I understand that LR is really not the best tool for large format photographers because of all of the extra steps you have to go through. Dose anyone use LR with there large format neg's? And if so what is your workflow setup?

[welly]

Here's a question, I am under the impression that Lightroom is for use with mainly digital files. If you shoot large format b&w neg's as I do, and scan them into PS, will LR invert them for you to a positive so you can start to edit? OR do you have to do your inverting and setting of levels first before you can import?

I understand that LR is really not the best tool for large format photographers because of all of the extra steps you have to go through. Dose anyone use LR with there large format neg's? And if so what is your workflow setup?

I invert my negatives in my scanning software, VueScan, which exports images as DNGs (digital negatives), TIFs or JPG. I don't use Lightroom to scan images and am not sure if it will anyway. I've never explored to find this out. I use VueScan to do all my scanning and Lightroom to do my modifications to the DNG or TIF file I export from VueScan.

[RichardSperry]

I don't know what you need.

But I need both LR and PS.

[RichardSperry]

And if not what does Lightroom do best as compared to PS?

The auto mask feature is extremely powerful and useful for me.

Makes light work of what is tortuous in PS. Painting edits(essentially painting on a layer mask) is very intuitive for me, and then being able to erase them back again.

The Shadow, Darks, Lights, Highlights sliders are very powerful. Essentially selective global curves editing.

I would hazard a guess as to why LR is so different than PS. One it is very young. PS has 20+ years of revisions stacked into it. Second I am pretty sure it started out as a mere plugin to PS, then got bought up quickly by Adobe. Virtually all other products that Adobe puts out now started as another software from a competitor or partner.