Most people are familiar with the powerful results Photoshop is capable of effecting. We’ve all seen images that have been “Photoshopped” on the Internet, especially on social media, where the subject has been altered to create almost unbelievable results.
Photoshop
Photoshop by Adobe is a feature packed image manipulation suite of tools, & is built to create images from scratch as a drawing tool, as well as manipulate photographs & images as they stand.
Lightroom
Lightroom is also an Adobe tool & it’s been developed to manage a large selection of photographs. Here, the tools are aimed at cataloging & organizing images. It’s a database driven application for filing images according to metadata (the photograph’s date, location, creator etc). Lightroom makes it easy for professional graphic designers & photographers to keep tabs on their files & to find them if they need to, via an inbuilt search facility.
Both Lightroom & Photoshop Are Adobe Products
So, if both products are developed by Adobe, why are there 2 different suites of tools? We will look at Adobe Photoshop versus Lightshop. The answer is that Lightroom is positioned as an extension of Photoshop, whereas Photoshop on its own is suitable for almost any design needs but it’s not so great at keeping a searchable database of files.
What Has Photoshop Got Over Lightroom
Photoshop is an extremely complex piece of software. It can literally take years to learn how to use it to its fullest potential. As opposed to Lightroom, it’s the university of images as against grade school. If you need to edit out unwanted features in images, retouch facial features, cut & replace subsets of an image, then Photoshop is the tool you need.
Lightroom doesn’t offer any layering or composite tools, whereas with Photoshop, various layering techniques are on offer. For instance, if you need to add a vase underneath a bunch of flowers & change the background so that the flowers stand on a shelf in front of a window — Photoshop allows you to create a layer for each operation, you can then move each object around independently & thereby create a totally new, & altered image from several originals.
Photoshop also allows users to draw over images, add text, & generally create images & digital drawings from scratch.
What Has Lightroom Got Over Photoshop
Lightroom is a wonderful file manager, whereas Photoshop is not so great. In Photoshop saved images must be selected by looking at thumbnails, while in Lightroom images can be organized into folders & the database can be filtered for easy searching.
Another aspect of Lightroom is that any manipulations conducted on images are non-destructive. Users can always go back to the original version of the picture if they are unhappy with changes they’ve effected. In Photoshop the only non-destructive elements are the “UnDo” tool or the separate layers of an image, if you’ve created them.
Lightroom packs a fairly powerful set of image manipulation tools, such as the ability to alter the contrast, exposure, brightness, hue, saturation & coloring of the picture. Users can also create slideshows & mosaics. However, all these tools are mirrored in Photoshop’s “Camera” tool. Nevertheless, because the learning curve associated to Photoshop is far steeper that connected to Lightroom, many photographers prefer to use Lighroom, especially to begin with.
Lightroom allows users to save settings they’ve used to good effect on an image & conduct batch editing on images in bulk, this feature is not available in Photoshop.
Both tools are only available on a subscription basis from Adobe.
