Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Photoshop is a fully featured bitmap editor. It has more sophisticated and creative filters. It does text and layers, advanced filtering and sharpening, and a lot more. Although LrC now does rudimentary masking, Ps uses layers and masks in ways that are not possible with LrC.

Lightroom Classic has very limited bitmap editing tools. While it uses the same ACR module as Photoshop and Bridge, it doesn't do much at the pixel level, comparatively, other than spotting.

The original Lightroom of the mid-2000s was designed with professional studio photography and editorial photography in mind. Adobe had about 10,000 beta testers from those communities. MOST of what pros need to do after a job — cull editing, raw conversion with parametric adjustments, slide shows for editors and customers, proof printing, web posting, exporting files for labs, and wedding album design — can be done in Lightroom Classic. But for advanced bitmap editing tasks, there's Photoshop.

one_eyed_pete Loc: Colonie NY

Agree, but I have to add that LRC masking and selection capabilities have been dramatically expanded in the past year so my need to edit in PS has further decreased. Still no layers though.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Yep. The longer I can stay in LrC and avoid the Ps black-hole time sucker, the better!

TheShoe Loc: Lacey, WA

Tilt before crop is the better sequence because adjusting the tilt will crop some amount. Doing it second may crop more than you want.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

If exposure is reasonable and image is sharp, I adjust tilt, then crop, then do exposure, white balance, and other parametric adjustments. In Lightroom Classic, following the top-to-bottom menu layout optimizes the application of effects and tools.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Thanks.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Agreed, I do tilt adjustment before cropping for that reason.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

I use full Photoshop after ACR and do all my work in 16-bit until a copy in 8-bit JPG for sharing or printing. I can pretty much do all the steps and techniques described here since I don't have the restrictions of PSE. If I had the most up to date version of Ps CC I could do even more, especially with the better Content Aware Fill Tools.

PhotogHobbyist Loc: Bradford, PA

Not sure if you were replying to me or not, Rick. As I stated in my post, I use PSE 2019. Opening a RAW image in ACR, opens it in a window with several sliders for exposure, contrast, clarity, etc. There is a button at the top for leveling and another for cropping but if I attempt to level first (which is accomplished by drawing a line onto the photo) and accepted, the photo is reduced to a square and tilted to level according to the line drawn. For that reason I make the slider adjustments on the RAW file in ACR then open in the editor and then can rotate/level according to my eye (which does a pretty darn good job of it) and crop as I see fit.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Tilt and aspect ratio/crop (not size/crop) are among the very first things I do to RAW files, using Lightroom.

I mostly use either 3:2 or 5:4 aspect ratios, but occasionally others like 1:1, 7:5, 14:11, when I anticipate using one of those sizes for printing.

I may also do some tweaks to color balance and exposure in LR, but that's about it.

I then pass off a 16 bit TIFF to Photoshop for finish work. I do most retouching and fine tuning of the image with the full tonal palette of 16 bit, size the image for it's final use, do any noise reduction I feel is necessary. Finally I will usually convert the image to an 8 bit sRGB JPEG and save it as such. (I occasionally end up with a TIFF or PSD and/or a different color profile, mostly just when a client has requested it for one reason or another.)