Both programs from Adobe are arguably the best at what they do. They do different things, but over time, each borrows features from the other, so the lines may one day blur considerably. Still, there is a basic difference: Photoshop is for manipulating one image; Lightroom is for manipulating large groups of images. In old-school terms: working with Photoshop is like working on a print. Working in Lightroom is like working in a darkroom. If you’re a photographer who wants to edit images on your computer, this Lightroom vs Photoshop comparison could help you save some money.
Some Background to Lightroom vs Photoshop
Lightroom vs Photoshop is a dilemma that many photographers, editors, and retouchers will have come up against when they start out in photo editing. Photoshop was developed as a photo retouching program. It excels at giving you the tools needed to make the most sophisticated changes you can imagine to any photograph. It is most popularly known for its ability to seamlessly combine parts of many photographs into one photograph that can fool the eye. Since it was first created, many features have been added to it that makes it easier to repair, modify, change, or replace any aspect of a digital image. But with all this power comes complexity. Adobe has been very good at simplifying these tools as much as possible. The truth is that this level of sophisticated retouching was never easy when all photographs were made with film. It took a highly skilled artist to retouch photographs. The techniques were complicated and required a skilled hand and eye.
Photoshop makes this all easier, but quality retouching that will totally fool the eye still requires skill. Part of that skill now is learning how to use Adobe Photoshop. This program always has been quite complex because what it does is very complex. Yes, there are many things you can do in Photoshop very quickly today. But the price is spending a lot of time learning how to use Photoshop. Another price is that every action you take in Photoshop causes some degradation of the image because it changes the pixel information in the file. Users would only work on a copy of the original image file because of this. They wanted to ensure that they always had the original image to go back to in case things went horribly wrong. Newer versions of Photoshop introduced ways to handle these changes very much like Lightroom (discussed below), which limits the damage done to an original image. In essence, Photoshop was built as a single image editor and at this, it is fantastic.
Adobe Lightroom was initially created as a way to manage large collections of digital photographs. It excels at helping you quickly review a lot of images, rate them, catalog them, attach keywords and create specific collections of images. Since cataloging is important, it provides excellent visibility into the metadata that is included in every photograph file. This includes information about the camera, lens, exposure, date it was made, and sometimes where it was made. With this visibility is the ability to attach other information like copyright, your name, web address, contact information, and any keywords you want to assign to the image. This information includes any rating or collections you assign to each image. In Lightroom, you can select any number of images and add this information whenever you want. This can be very useful years later when you want to find that special photo of your aunt or gather all of the pictures of your mother. Photoshop can do some of this, but it can be tedious to do so.
Lightroom has also added many features since it was created. You can change the white balance, exposure, lightness, darkness, contrast, sharpness, or blurring, and do some basic retouching to one or a group of images that you select. This is the main difference between Lightroom and Photoshop. In Lightroom, you can modify several images in the same way without opening each one of them. That’s because Lightroom stores all of this information as a set of instructions that rides alongside the image. These instructions are only applied when Lightroom shows you the image on a screen or when it outputs the image in whatever format and size you want. By applying all of these changes at once, there is no visible degradation of the image. In Lightroom, the original file is never modified.
Which to Start With – Lightroom or Photoshop?
As you’ll see below, Lightroom vs Photoshop is less a question of which is best but more a question of what you want to do. There is another key difference. If your image files are JPEGs, Photoshop is the better tool to use. A JPEG file has already been modified from the original capture. In creating it, the camera or program, threw away some information to make the file size smaller. That information cannot be recaptured. What you can do to “fix” that image is limited. However, Photoshop has been working with JPEG files (and other compressed file formats) from the beginning. It has several tools that can help repair problematic images and improve them considerably. It can work magic, but it can’t work miracles. Photoshop can also work with many different types of image files. In fact, it was originally created as a file-type transfer program. Retouching capabilities were added over time.
If you work with RAW files, Lightroom is the better starting place. Lightroom was created to work with RAW image files. It can handle any type of RAW image file, regardless of whether your camera is a Cannon, Leica, Nikon, Olympus, or Sony. Retouching features in Lightroom are significant but do not match the power of Photoshop. (For example, Lightroom does not use layers. Layers were introduced into Photoshop to allow reversible changes to an image. Lightroom does not need layers for this reason.) Lightroom also works well with TIFF and PSD files. It can work with JPEG and PNG files, but your options are limited – the quality of your starting file is already limited. For best results, use RAW images in Lightroom.
One more advantage of Lightroom: you do not have to create multiple copies of an image file to explore different options. Lightroom allows you to create a “virtual copy” of any image file. You can create many “virtual copies” if you wish. It does not actually duplicate the file because it never touches the file. Lightroom only shows you a software image of the file while you are working on it. With Virtual Copies, you can view the image as color in one and black and white in another. You can explore alternative ways of modifying your images (e.g.: one lighter, another darker) and decide later which one you want to print or share. In Lightroom, you can always undo everything you do to an image.
Which Adobe product is better in 2022?
Over time, Adobe will make upgrades to both programs, but one thing will always remain true: Photoshop makes pixel levels changes to an image at a fixed resolution. Lightroom saves instruction sets for how to change an image that is only applied when you save a new copy of the file at whatever resolution you choose.
If you would like to learn more about Adobe software check out our articles:
How to get Adobe Lightroom for free
