“Should I get Lightroom or Photoshop?” This is a question I get asked a lot, usually by people who own Photoshop Elements and are thinking of upgrading to either Lightroom or the full version of Photoshop.
Six years ago this was an easy decision, because Lightroom didn’t exist. If you wanted to upgrade from Elements, the full version of Photoshop was the only real choice. But then Apple launched Aperture, Adobe countered with Lightroom, Nikon and Canon upgraded their software, and a host of other companies added even more options.
For now I’m going to keep this simple and just talk about Lightroom and Photoshop—mainly because these are the two most popular choices, but also because they’re the two applications I’m most familiar with, and they’re natural choices for people wishing to graduate from Adobe’s other photo-editing program, Elements.
The Short Answer
Here’s the simplest solution to the Lightroom vs. Photoshop dilemma: get both. But I’ll assume that people ask me this because they can’t afford both, or don’t want to learn two different programs.
So here’s a slightly longer answer: If you want to wring every ounce of perfection out of a few images, make big prints from them, and don’t mind learning a complicated piece of software, then take the plunge and buy Photoshop CS5. If you don’t need perfection, want to process many images efficiently, and/or wish to spend less time learning software, then get Lightroom.
Of course it’s not quite that neat and simple. You can make beautiful, big prints with Lightroom and Elements—but the full version of Photoshop will give you some extra tools that Lightroom and Elements don’t have. And you can process large numbers of images fairly efficiently with Photoshop CS5—but Lightroom is faster and, for most people, easier to learn.
Some Pros and Cons
In comparing these programs, it’s important to realize that Photoshop CS5 includes almost all the functionality of Lightroom, and more. Bridge, a separate application included with CS5, contains most of the viewing, sorting, and keywording functions of Lightroom’s Library module. Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), also included with CS5, is essentially identical to Lightroom’s Develop module. And then, of course, CS5 also has something Lightroom doesn’t have: the 800-pound gorilla of the photo-software world, Photoshop itself.
So if you want the ultimate power and sophistication of the full version of Photoshop, you could actually save money by skipping Lightroom, since you can do essentially all the same things with Bridge and Camera Raw.
The problem with this scenario is that going back and forth between these three separate applications—Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, and Photoshop—is inherently clunky. And Bridge is slow, unintuitive, and buggy.
Lightroom elegantly melds the functions of Bridge and Camera Raw (plus a few others) into one program. Lightroom is also usually faster than Bridge, and, given its complexity, fairly intuitive and easy to learn. (Some people might differ with this of course—it depends on what you’re used to.)
I’ve seen many students who were unfamiliar with Lightroom at the beginning of a workshop become fans by the end. It’s a great tool for people who have made the transition from film reluctantly, or who don’t want to delve into all the complexities of the digital darkroom, yet want something sophisticated enough to grow into it as their knowledge and skills improve.
My Experience—And Why I Now Use Lightroom More Than Photoshop
I came to Lightroom from a different direction. I’d used Photoshop for many years before Lightroom existed. At first Lightroom was just a more convenient substitute for the awkward combination of Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw—a better way of viewing, editing, sorting, and keywording images than Bridge, with ACR’s engine for making basic adjustments to Raw files before bringing them into Photoshop.
As Lightroom has grown more sophisticated I use it more and more, and Photoshop less and less. The addition of the Adjustment Brush with Lightroom 2 allowed me to do dodging and burning—something I find essential with every image. Now I can take many images directly from Raw file to large print without ever touching Photoshop except for final print sharpening.
I’ve also come to appreciate the flexibility of Lightroom’s non-destructive workflow. Lightroom never alters your original Raw or JPEG file. Instead, it writes a set of instructions about how you want the image to look, and applies those instructions only if and when you export the image out of Lightroom (This applies to Adobe Camera Raw also). This means that I can always go back and change any aspect of any image without having to start over.
Let me give you an example of why I think this is so important: Last year, with the advent of Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5, Adobe upgraded the noise reduction and sharpening algorithms in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. This was a major improvement in my opinion, something I wanted to take advantage of.
Unfortunately, I have a lot of older images that were processed with initial adjustments in Camera Raw or Lightroom, then taken into Photoshop for the rest. Since I processed these photographs before it was possible to bring Raw files into Photoshop as Smart Objects (if you’re unfamiliar with Smart Objects, you can see an example in this video), I have to start over with each image if I want to take advantage of the new Lightroom 3 engine.
If I had originally processed these images entirely with Lightroom I wouldn’t need to start over. A few clicks would update all these images with the latest noise reduction and sharpening algorithms, while keeping all my other adjustments to the images.
Having learned this lesson, as I’ve re-processed my older images I’ve used Lightroom as much as possible, Photoshop as little as possible. Not only has this been relatively quick and easy, the results—not just the sharpness and noise, but overall appearance—are as good or better than my previous work in Photoshop. No doubt this is largely do to my increased experience, but it shows what Lightroom is capable of. And if Adobe ever upgrades the engine in Lightroom again, I can update all these Raw files with just a couple of clicks.
Yes, you can make Photoshop behave in a non-destructive way by using Adjustment Layers and Smart Objects, but there are limitations. And you can’t update the sharpening settings on a hundred Photoshop files containing Smart Objects with just a few clicks.
Why Photoshop is Still Essential
As you’ve gathered, I’ve grown to like Lightroom quite a bit. It’s not perfect, but it does a lot of things well. Yet I still find Photoshop indispensable for some things, like these:
– Perspective cropping
– Serious retouching (for simple dust spots I can use Lightroom)
– Complex selections
– Combining two or more images (composites, expanding contrast range, expanding depth of field, panoramas)
– Targeted curves
– Adjusting a precise range of hues with Hue/Saturation
– Selective Color adjustments
Many of these things can be done in Elements, including perspective cropping, retouching, combining two or more images, and the finely-tuned Hue/Saturation adjustments. Of course there are some limitations—for example, you can’t open images in Elements as Smart Objects, restricting flexibility. And then there are those things that Elements and Lightroom can’t do. I frequently use that Selective Color adjustment for landscape photographs (see this video for a demonstration). Targeted curves are also sometimes indispensable (as shown in this tutorial by Charlie Cramer).
But nevertheless I think the Lightroom/Elements combo can work for many photographers, even most. Again, it depends on your goals: ultimate power to achieve perfection, but with more complexity, or slightly less power, but with greater ease and simplicity.
I always welcome your questions and comments, so have at it—or let me have it, as the case may be! What’s been your experience with these programs?
Michael,
I found your comments interesting. I would like to add to them. Adobe has finally realized that Photoshop will never be solely for photographers, and as they continue to update it that continue to discover more and more bugs. They bought light room to get a photography chassis that they could continue to add to, as a product solely for photography. If you watch the upgrades this will become more and more obvious over time.
That said, Lightroom serves as a great intake program, in that it catalogues, provides a light table for preliminary review, and basic editing, these are the strengths that CS5 does not possess. Lots of us now use LR as our intake and cursory development and move to CS5 for more intense processing if needed.
In the past year I have begun to shoot medium format (using a Phase One P40+) and have started using their software, Capture 1. While it is not as intuitive as Adobe products, it is the best processing software I have seen for a variety of reasons. I would recommend that you try the demo…
Finally, I use ImagePrint for my printing. Sometimes I will print out of CS5 or LR or Capture 1, but when I want a stellar image, Imageprint is the only way to go.
Thanks for your comments Vincent. I tried the Capture One software some time ago, and didn’t like it – very unintuitive. But maybe it’s better now, and I’ll give it another try sometime. As for ImagePrint, I think it just doesn’t fit most people’s budgets, but I’m glad you’re getting good results with it.
Since I am strictly an amateur photographer, I am using Photoshop Elements 7 but I have just purchased Photoshop Elements 10. I think that I might purchase Lightroom later after I have learned Photoshop Elements 10. Is this the way to go? I find all of the programs difficult to learn. Am I on the right track?
Patsy, this is a tough call, but I’d probably recommend skipping Elements altogether and going straight to Lightroom. I think Lightroom is just as easy to use, maybe even easier, and if you use Lightroom now you won’t have to learn both Elements and Lightroom.
Hi Michael,
I have your ebook and have your Digital Landscape book on the way. I am a fan of your work. I am on the same page as far as preferring to use Lightroom for most of my work. I do have a question for you as far as Sharpening goes. You mentioned that you use CS5 for final print sharpening. Why is that? Lightroom has print sharpening as well. Do you find CS5’s print sharpening to be better? On a similar note, I’ve been debating whether to do my sharpening in Lightroom or leave all sharpening work to CS5. Obviously, CS5 has more powerful sharpening tools, but have you found Lightrom capture sharpening to be as good as CS5 or good enough?
Howard, thanks for the kind words about my work. Regarding your sharpening question, yes, CS5’s print sharpening is much better than Lightroom’s. Lightroom only has three choices, none very good in my opinion, while the Smart Sharpen tool in Photoshop gives you much more control.
>On a similar note, I’ve been debating whether to do my sharpening in Lightroom or leave all sharpening work to CS5. Obviously, CS5 has more powerful sharpening tools, but have you found Lightrom capture sharpening to be as good as CS5 or good enough?
I think you need both. I’ve found that I can wring much more fine detail out of my prints by adding sharpening to the Raw file in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw before going into Photoshop proper. If I don’t do any sharpening to the Raw file I lose a lot of fine detail. But it still needs a bit more sharpening after sizing the file to the printing dimensions and resolution – the final print sharpening that you talk about. The best tool that I know of for this is the Smart Sharpen filter in Photoshop proper.
Thanks Michael! This is exactly the perspective I needed. I too use Photoshop, RAW and Bridge in my workflow and needed advice from a professional about the advantages of Lightroom. You’ve sold me on it. Thanks so much!!
Julia in Maryland
You’re welcome Juila – glad you found this helpful.
Michael,
How does CS6 affect this topic? Do I still need Lightroom? I currently use Lightroom 3 and love it. I mainly shoot landscape. I always shoot .raw and edit in Lightroom.
CS6 has the same version of ACR as Lightroom 4. I have been waiting to upgrade to Lightroom 4 until fall color time. Are three still advantages to having both?
Brad, I don’t think that the advent of Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS6 changes the fundamental points of this article. The advantages and disadvantages of each program are still about the same. If anything, Lightroom 4 makes Photoshop less necessary because of its ability to handle high-contrast images so well. If you have Lightroom 3 I certainly think it’s worth the $79 upgrade to get Lightroom 4, even if you plan to get CS6 too.
Thanks Michael, I ordered CS6 yesterday. I had a $400 off VIP offer that was too good to pass up, so I only paid $249.95. I’ll upgrade to Lightroom 4 soon as well. It seems like the added controls are highly useful to developing landscape photos. I would like to see a Lightroom 4 and CS6 full process flow video or eBook from you.
Thank you for all your helpful information. My question is is your advice still relevant (about the final sharpening being done in Photoshop since it is now 2015 and your post is form 2012), so I was thinking with the advent of LR 5 (which I have) that maybe the sharpening is better, or do I still need Photoshop for the best sharpening (which is important to me)?
Judy, I still use Photoshop for final print sharpening. Lightroom’s sharpening has gotten better since I wrote this, but that’s not really the issue. The sharpening in Lightroom’s Develop Module is meant as “input” sharpening to compensate for any softness created by lenses or the camera’s low-pass filter. The sharpening tools in the the Develop Module in Lightroom (and in Adobe Camera Raw) are excellent, probably the best of any Raw-processing software out there. But there’s a second stage to sharpening, the output sharpening, or final print sharpening, and there Lightroom’s tools are rather crude, and not good enough for me, so I still do this in Photoshop. There are some plugins out there for sharpening too, and one of them might be a perfectly good substitute for Photoshop, but I haven’t used them, so I couldn’t tell you first hand.
Michael,
thank you so much for answering me, as this sharpening issue (on my photos) has caused me a bit of grief, I would compare my “sharpened” photos to the Pros, and mine always seemed to fall short. I could see by the Exif data of one of the photographers that I admire, and she says she “only” used Lightroom, but I could tell by the exif that she was not using LR’s sharpening, so I guessed she was using Photoshop to sharpen. So I guess I will have to bite a very expensive bullet and purchase Photoshop so that I can be happy with my photos. But, thanks to you with your great explanation, at least I know now that I am headed in the right direction 🙂 So money well spent.
Judy, there are a lot of reasons why your photos might not look as sharp as the “pros,” or someone else’s photographs, and probably the least likely of those reasons is that they used Photoshop for sharpening and you didn’t. When you made these comparisons, were you looking at actual prints from these pros, or just images online? If it’s the latter, well it’s hard to tell anything from JPEGs viewed online. If it’s prints, do you know what camera they were using? What lenses? If you’re not using the same equipment, that also makes it’s hard to compare.
Wow, you are great sharing your knowledge, thank you so much.
I am viewing photographers on-line blogs/websites only no prints.
I was comparing how sharp their photos looked on line (not the actual processing of the photos) I am getting along fairly well with processing my photos in LR (I am a bit of a beginner, but not horrible at it). I was distressed with looking at my photos when I viewed them on my computer compared to how Pros photos look online (sharpness wise). Plus I printed out some of my photos, and they were not sharp (my camera captures are sharp though). So I just figured that perhaps just using LR was not going to “finish off” my photos alone. So taking into account, that my photo capture at the time was “sharp” and did not miss focus, again, I come back to the question, LR is not enough?
My equipment: Nikon D700, nikon 50mm 1.8, and nikon 85mm 1.4. Computer: Mac 27″
Unless you can think of something else that I may be doing wrong.
thanks again for your help 🙂
Judy, I don’t use Photoshop for sharpening JPEGs that I post online. The only sharpening these images get is in the Develop Module of Lightroom. Your problem is not with how you sharpen photos, but something else. Without seeing them I don’t know what that is, but the most common cause of unsharp photos is camera shake, either because you’re hand-holding at too slow a shutter speed, or because you’re using a flimsy tripod, or using a tripod without also using a remote, cable release, or self-timer, or you have image stabilization on (which should be off on a tripod).
I use both programs. Lightroom as a database, mainly to search and Photoshop to work. My workflow: Get my raw files out of my camera with Bridge, directly set them as.dng files (if possible, my Sigma Merrills .x3F raw files are not supported). Give the map a date and short name. Give the files a keyword and now I am ready to process the .dng files from Bridge to the raw converter. Here I do the most work. I save the dng files and the ones witch I want to process further I save as tiff. Those tiff’s I process further in PS. The last step is to save those tiff’s as jpeg’s. Ready now with my work I open Lightroom and import the new files.
If I need a photo from my history I open Lightroom and search the photo’s there. If I need to process those chosen photo’s I do that in PS from within LR. I never process a photo in Lightroom, I make sites in Lightroom, that maebey the exception.
There are lots of ways lead to Rome and I am not saying this is the best workflow. But for me it is.
Thanks for your comments Leo. This is a pretty old article, and a lot has changed in the software world since I wrote this. But going from Adobe Camera Raw to Photoshop, saving as a TIFF, then importing those TIFFs into Lightroom creates a rather inflexible workflow, where it’s hard to go back make changes without having to start over. Lightroom is well-suited to sorting the images and giving them keywords – better than Bridge, in my opinion. And if you stay in Lightroom you’re always assured of having a completely flexible and non-desctructive workflow, where you can always change any aspect of anything you’ve done to an image without starting over. You can keep that non-destructive and flexible workflow even when going into Photoshop by opening the Raw file from Lightroom (or Adobe Camera Raw for that matter) as a Smart Object in Photoshop, then making all the changes in Photoshop using Smart Filters or Adjustment Layers.
Explaining all the details of this is a bit beyond the scope of a comment here, but I include an example of taking an image from Lightroom to Photoshop as a Smart Object in my Landscapes in Lightroom ebook.
I never said I import those tiffs, I throw them away. As I said, I do the most work in the raw converter. It has a much bigger workspace then Lightroom. I have also a lot of my presets there. It works for me, Lightroom is a database.
Okay. When you say that you do “most of the work in the raw converter,” are you referring to Adobe Camera Raw? And when you say it has a “much bigger workspace,” are you talking about the color space, or something else, like the screen real estate?
Of Course I am talking about Adobe Camera Raw. I am talking about the workspace, the photo you are working on. Lightroom is a very good database (with a lot of quirks, especially when you also work there), Photoshop (with Bridge and the Adobe Camera Raw converter) is my workspace. It is not for nothing that Adobe has two major programs.