Curmudgeon wrote:
If you post process in Lightroom, why? Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop duplicates almost all the adjustments you can do in Lightroom and has much more powerful tools than ACR can fix. There must be a reason but I don't know what it is.
Adobe engineered Lightroom CLASSIC for professionals. It is an IMAGE DATABASE that happens to develop raw (and other) files using ACR. True, it is mostly a PARAMETRIC tool, used to make gross adjustments. It is designed to keep you out of Photoshop, in an EFFICIENT environment, until you need Photoshop's layers, masks, bitmap editing tools, filters, etc. for finer work.
Photoshop began in the late 1980s. It evolved rapidly into a piece of bloatware that many different groups of users found overly complex. By 2000, it had become a "black hole time suck" into which users would fall, either enthralled by its possibilities, or befuddled by its complexity.
Lightroom was an answer to that situation.
The image database concept in Lightroom Classic is simple:
Import LINKS to digital files, and work only on PROXY COPIES of them. The originals are NEVER, EVER, altered — But they can be Exported, Printed, Uploaded to websites, and placed in book layouts. All of your changes to images are virtual... They are instructions in a text file! Those instructions are applied only when the files are exported, printed, uploaded, or otherwise rendered to somewhere else. This is called "non-destructive editing" or "touch pixels once."
The Lightroom Library module has rating tools, cull editing tools, tools for adding metadata manually... In short, you use it to identify, rank, edit, and catalog your work. All of these tools store instructions in the database or in sidecar text files that Photoshop can read.
The Develop module is one of THREE implementations of Adobe Camera Raw (Photoshop and Bridge also use ACR). The interface is different, designed to do those sorts of things that would prepare studio quality proofs, prior to retouching or other fine work that Photoshop is intended for.
Because Lightroom is designed to connect with and to Photoshop and other applications, it is the *central hub of all a photographer's imaging efforts.* It is meant to be a sort of clearing house. You send partially completed files to various plug-ins, or to Photoshop, or to other applications, and the finished images come back into your catalog for tweak editing, printing, uploading to your website, exporting for labs, archiving, etc.
The package printing routines that were once a big part of Photoshop are now basically the Print module in Lightroom Classic. You can create multiple image layouts, portrait "packages," and other designs there. You can print to high-end, directly-connected printers (Canon or Epson wide format, for example), directly converting the color from Lightroom's wide gamut space to the custom ICC profile for the printer/ink/paper combination in use. That is HUGE if you are a professional or an art museum making giclee prints.
So... I hope this gives you the impression that there is one helluva lot more to Lightroom Classic than most people assume. It was embraced MADLY by the "street corner studio" photographers, photojournalists, and photo illustrators when it was first introduced. It had some seriously great competition from Apple with Aperture, but because Lightroom ran on both Mac and Windows, it won that battle over time.
I do most of my "image grunt work" in Lightroom, and most of my "polishing" work in Photoshop and a few plug-ins (NIK collection and Negative Lab Pro). It saves me tons of time, preps images for proofs that are often "good enough" for my end uses, and generally keeps me organized.