Professional photographers use Lightroom to manage large volumes of images.
Lightroom and Photoshop, which are both Adobe products, play a vital role in the digital workflow of many amateur and professional photographers. Lightroom combines archiving and editing functions to create a more user-friendly version of Photoshop. In contrast, Photoshop provides precision editing for images that need special attention, beyond the capabilities of Lightroom. The learning curve for Lightroom is much shorter than Photoshop, and may be a better editing option for beginning or amateur photographers.
Referencing File Vs. Direct Editing of Image
A major difference between Lightroom and Photoshop are the methods that each program uses to handle individual files. This point can be difficult to understand at first, but makes a major difference in the archiving and editing of images. Lightroom imports a reference copy of the original file, not the actual digital image, into the program interface for editing. This means that any edits made to a file in Lightroom will not affect the original file in any way and the image must be exported out of Lightroom for the edits to appear. In contrast, when a file is opened in Photoshop, the image file is directly altered. If you are working with an original file and make an irreversible edit to the image, you cannot fix or return the file to its original state once saved.
Editing Tools
Photoshop is a powerful editing platform with almost endless editing options using a variety of tools and special settings. Lightroom utilizes the basic elements of Photoshop's most common editing tools, such as exposure adjustments, color shifting and cropping, and allows you to make quick edits to the reference image file. A majority of images only need basic editing and Lightroom makes it possible to edit quickly and apply bulk editing actions to images using saved presets. These presets memorize a common action you execute and you can apply them to any number of images at once. For example, if you photographed a wedding and 300 images were slightly dark, you could adjust all 300 images by applying your lighten preset with one step. Bulk actions can also be applied in Photoshop, but are more complicated to use. In contrast, if you had one image in that wedding shoot that needed special editing for a skin tone adjustment, Photoshop would provide the proper tools to accomplish this task, where Lightroom could not make such a detailed adjustment.
Archiving and Exporting
Lightroom is also an archiving and cataloging program. Once images are imported, you can place them into special catalogs by certain perimeters, such as event, subject or date, and you can access them at any time in this catalog. You can sort, rate and compare images for editing using simple keyboard shortcuts. This is vital when editing thousands of images at time and most professional photographers need such efficiency to manage their work. Exporting is also a vital step in Lightroom. Once you have edited your images, you will export your files to a special location and all of the images will contain the adjustments made in Lightroom. During the export step, you can also choose multiple locations and sizes for exports. Photoshop has no archiving option and is only an editing platform.
Slideshow Options And Web Galleries
Lightroom also provides the option for displaying images in a slideshow format with a few simple steps and exporting images to a ready-made website gallery. Slideshows are particularly convenient if you wish to display of body of work to clients for feedback or presentation. Photoshop does provide some options for exporting images to HTML pages for website galleries, but the actions to accomplish this can be complicated.
Tags: original file, accomplish this, archiving editing, editing images, editing platform