Photoshop vs Lightroom

Photoshop is used by professionals everywhere in a wide variety of fields including photography, graphic design and digital art. It is the de facto standard for image manipulation. If you've seen a magazine ad featuring a model, you've probably seen the effects of Photoshop. You won't be alone when using Photoshop.

A wide variety of plugins that add new effects, improve existing functionality and simplify workflow are available.

There's a huge number of both free and paid tutorials available online. Websites like Lynda.com offer premium high-quality, in-depth tutorials, but there are plenty of free alternatives to be found on YouTube, blogs and specialized sites on the Internet.

A stripped down version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Elements can be bought as a standalone application for $100.

Photoshop includes content-aware tools such as content-aware fill that can fill in a select area based on what surrounds it.

Photoshop is the most fully featured image editing software available today allowing you to perform highly advanced image manipulation.

It has tools for RAW image adjustments, lens correction, retouching, image stitching, HDR, fixing framing. It supports most professional color modes and file formats. It includes extensive lists of filters, styles, effects, fonts as well as tools for painting, sketching and typography work. It understands both raster and vector graphics. It even includes tools for video editing, working with 3D objects and support for 3D printing.

You can save all projects directly to the Creative Cloud allowing you to access them from any device and with any relevant Adobe software.

Lightroom is another image editing software from Adobe that's specifically designed for photo editing and managing of large quantities of digital images.

There's a free mobile app available for iOS, Android & Windows Phone.

Lightroom allows, for example, organizing images based on folders, color labels, flags, rating, keywords, GPS location, it can automatically create smart albums (albums that automatically update based on set rules) and it can be set to automatically backup, rename based on set rules, apply default processing, add keywords to images on import. It offers that functionality in an intuitive way and allows extensively customizing layout, behavior and workflow of managing assets to better suit your needs.

Can merge multiple shots into one in order to expand dynamic range.

Lightroom has built-in facial recognition support that can be used to find the same person in any collection of photographs.

Lightroom has over 900 lens profiles from all kinds of manufacturers, including major lens brands like Canon, Nikon, Leica, Pentax, Ricoh, etc. You can see the full list of supported lenses here. Lens profiles will in most cases speed up the process of correcting lens distortion down to 1-2 clicks.

At a high level the interface is organized into broad groups of tools called workflow modules. Modules like "Library" for asset management and "Develop" for manipulating the photos. Each module displays only those tools that are needed for that task. This allows you to separate concerns between tasks and reduces interface clutter. When you're, for example, developing the image, you're not bothered by interface tools relating to exporting it.

Within each module tools are grouped in a logical manner. Develop module, for example, will group tools relating to basic image adjustment, lens correction, and effects.

And there are a plethora of keyboard shortcuts that improve the workflow speed even further. At all times you can easily navigate between images you're working via arrow keys, quickly compare images before and after making edits with \, or see side by side comparisons with y.

You can connect your camera directly to Lightroom and have Lightroom display images as soon as they are captured.