CamB wrote:
Lightroom is absolutely capable of high-quality photo finishing. Some of my photos see Photoshop for specific needs but most don't. This struck me as a very odd comment, one I have never seen on UHH before.
...Cam
I've said and written that many times on this and other forums and elsewhere, as have other people....
LR is a powerful cataloging, organization, archive management tool with rather weak and limited image editing capabilities.
PS is a very powerful image editing and optimization tool, with rather weak cataloging, organization and archive management capabilities.
I've used PS since version 4 (around 1995) and LR since the first version (roughly ten years).
On Tuesday evening I finished using LR to sort and edit 1500 images that I took last Sunday, making low resolution "proof" quality RAW conversions from roughly 500 of the images I felt were the best and uploading those into nine online galleries for clients to view.
When the orders for finished prints come in, I'll go back to LR to help me locate the image, tweak it a little there if needed (such as changing the crop).... THEN I
always pass the image off to Photoshop for finishing (it's a single click to do so, in LR). I have never been able to fully finish an image in LR to anywhere near the level that's possible with PS. No one can.
To some folks, LR's powerful volume image handling and limited image editing and optimization capabilities are adequate for their purposes. The results are sufficient for however they plan to use their images. But LR's brushes and filters are crude and coarse by comparison to PS's, and much of LR's adjustment capabilities effect the entire image (i.e."global"). It cannot do highly selective edits, layers & masks, precise color replacement (great to fix chromatic aberration), selective blurring or sharpening, doesn't offer a number of alternate methods of sharpening, and simply cannot do many other things that PS can. PS is able to work as precisely as individual pixel editing. LR cannot even come close to that.
A lot of folks who "only use LR" probably just don't know what they're missing, what's possible with PS and how much more fully finished their images might be. But, they not may want or need it.... and that's their choice.
Other people who only work with a small number of images one at a time and/or use some other means of archiving and cataloging might get by with PS alone. Before LR was available, I did that and it was a much slower process. PS is not good at handling large volumes of images quickly and efficiently. It's primarily a "one image at a time" editor. Where I spend a few seconds per image tweaking things a bit in LR, in orderto work through 100 or 200 images an hour, I often spend many minutes, sometimes even one or more hours working to fully finish an individual image in PS.
LR and PS are designed to complement each other.... In fact Adobe only offers them as a package now. You aren't required to download and install both, but you are paying for both of them. And if you are only using one or the other, you're quite likely missing out on a lot.
Lightroom is comparatively easy to learn... maybe a month or two practice with it, consulting one or two books... maybe take one or two classes if you learn better that way or are in a hurry or just want to improve your skills.
Photoshop is extremely complex and a lot more challenging to learn thoroughly. You could easily acquire a stack of books and take a year's worth of college level classes to learn to fully use it.
I also suspect there's some resistance to "Photoshopping" an image.... a general perception that it means making unnatural images and "cheating". I usually strive to make my images look more natural with Photoshop.... perhaps the most dramatic changes being to "expand" a background (to accommodate a particular print size) or remove overhead power lines or a pile of horse poop from an image, or similar. For example, I had a client who wanted 16x20 portraits of each of her horses. I had a great shots of both and one worked fine in that size. But the good shot of the other horse simply wouldn't crop well to the 5:4 aspect ratio. Rather than taking a half day to go re-shoot the image or do a lousy crop that cut off part of the subject's face, I used PS to expand the canvas a little and carefully added some of the distant, heavily blurred background to allow the 2nd image to be scaled and cropped similarly. I also "cleaned" up a little dust and dirt around both horses' tear ducts and noses, and retouched a fly off of one horse's face. In other images I've added background blur, while keeping a subject sharp... or color corrected and exposure balanced a sunlit background area differently from a subject in shade. As far as I was concerned, none of this is "cheating" or "faked" or any of the negative connotations that sometimes are attached to "Photoshopping". And, all this would have been difficult to do well or totally impossible to do in LR... but is fairly easy and doable in PS.
LR and PS are pretty much the standard for pros and commercial work. But they come with a steep learning curve, especially PS, and are quite possibly overkill for many amateurs.
Elements can do many of the same things PS can do, plus has some of the sorting and archive management capabilities of LR. It's easier to learn and more of an "all in one" program, sort of a "lite" version combining major aspects of both LR & PS.