axmanmi

I have a Mac and I use Photos to manage my photos. The editing capability is limited. I wonder if it is worth it to get Lightroom mainly for better editing and continue to use Photos for management. Does anyone use both?

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Lightroom would be your superior answer for both library management and editing. You can subscribe or purchase. If you should purchase, recognize the final, as of now, purchase version will support the RAW format for cameras only through mid- to late-2017. But, if you don't shoot raw, this is a non issue.

rjaywallace Loc: Wisconsin

I use both but, as of now, not all my saved images are in Photos - only the ones I’ve shared via email and social media. The difference comes from the fact that I edit on a MacBook Pro and my primary Photos catalog is on my iPad. From Lightroom v5.7 or On1, my saved images go to Documents with titles that include the date (yymmdd) and a description. From there I may post to Facebook, for example, or to the UHH Photo Gallery. When I view those photos - generally on my iPad - I save most of them to Photos. The monthly volume of images saved to Photos is relatively low.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Affinity Photo ($50) is a good complement to Apple Photos.

If you go the Adobe route, the Photography CC Bundle is $120/year or $10/month. It includes Photoshop CC 2018, Lightroom CLASSIC CC 2018 (formerly both Lightroom 6 and Lightroom CC 2015), and the NEW Lightroom CC 2018 (Formerly Lightroom Mobile). Read all the advertising carefully before you load Lightroom. Lr Classic CC and Lr CC are very different apps.

PixelStan77 Loc: Vermont/Chicago

Welcome to UHH. I agree 100 percent with CHG_CANON response to you. For now i bought LR6 disk and not into the cloud.I use a MAC also.

blackest Loc: Ireland

May I suggest getting Rawpower from gentlemen coders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhcsw7m1Cik

Aperture was really good but Apple decided to create photos instead they use the same raw engine. Rawpower works as a photos extension or standalone and gives you back the control you had with aperture (and beyond). It's in the App store for around $15. The fella who wrote it was the lead developer at Apple for Aperture.

This longer video is also useful if you are interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSpHIT0ok_Q

RawPower is on the appstore.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Thanks for the enlightenment! That’s cool.

Leicaflex Loc: Cymru

Luminar 2018 software challenges Lightroom.
$84 dollars, one off payment, no subscription.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

In Lr, you can only edit images that are added to it's catalog. If you don't intend to use the catalog, then you should use Photoshop, which has the exact same editor as Lr, but with a slower, more cumbersome interface.

The main advantage of either Ps or Lr is to create virtual collections, which does not require that you duplicate images and place them in different folders.

This is not possible in iPhotos, but you are offered a workaround. It's not pretty.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7041283?start=0&tstart=0

Either Adobe Bridge (file browser) or Lightroom (metadata-based catalog) are far more elegant and easier to implement.

warrior Loc: Paso Robles CA

Lightroom 5 and Photoshop Elements 15 here.

blackest Loc: Ireland

One handy option in lightroom is the hard drive publishing feature , there are other publishing options. I'm playing around with Photobook publishing software (i don't think it does enough but its a good intermediate step, next step Affinity Designer).

Anyway by Publishing to a folder on my harddrive the book software imports the photos from there if I decide to make a change to a photo maybe make it black & white I can re-edit in lightroom and republish and the book automatically updates with the changed image.

I'm doing this with lightroom 5.7 (recently saw it on amazon for $48). As an organisational tool lightroom is superb and Lightroom 5 is still pretty solid although the maps module is a bit messed up since google changed the API http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/gps works still and offers a lot of external options for showing your mapped photo's adding location information ect.. Incidently even without a working map you can still pull together images in the same area within lightroom and make collections it just won't display them on the broken map :)

Lightroom 6 maybe a better alternative for some as I believe there are problems with the case sensitive file system in high Sierra.

If you do have an unsupported camera then adobes free dng converter will work just set it to work , make a brew and get back to it when it's done you don't have to watch it :)

The lightroom hierarchy , the way it organises photo's is pretty good for other editing programs e.g aperture will import your photos without moving them from where lightroom has them stored.

Ednsb Loc: Santa Barbara

Disagree on this. No Dam and lots of issues in both support and the production release from yesterday. It has some nice features but will be a plugin for me in my workflow at best.

On1 Raw 2018 released last week is the closest to a replacement for Lightroom 6 for me. I too am a long time disappointed photographer as I had to move from Nik to Aperature to Lightroom to On1. I own Luminar, PS Elements, Lightroom 6, Photos, Aperature and Topaz.. My go to going forward is On1 Raw because it works..