Difference between Lightroom and Photoshop

Both the Lightroom and the Photoshop are products of the Adobe and is also famous for the Acrobat Reader! Photography is an excellent career and often it is pursued as a hobby by most people. Do you know that those photographers used to edit the photographs that they take before those were put to prints? Yes, not every photograph comes out gorgeous as soon as they are taken. But a few editing techniques could boost the real beauty in those images and such a job is done by photo editing tools like Photoshop, Lightroom, GIMP, Picasa, etc. These are products from different companies and there exist differences with respect to their features. But Both the Lightroom and the Photoshop are the products of the same provider, the Adobe, and most of us wonder why two products and how they differ? If you have the same questions, and probably you get your doubts cleared in this article.

What is Photoshop?

It was developed by the Adobe and in the 1990’s it became as one of the widely used photo editing tools. It was created with a set of simpler photo editing features and those could be easily handled by a beginner by himself. It is because of its simplicity and usability that the Photoshop has been gaining its popularity day-by-day. The editing features could help lots of professionals such as graphic designer, photographers, animators, architects, and publishers. It also helps the 3D-artists to come up with excellent 3D pictures. Photoshop also helps to remove skin blemishes seen on your photographs, and it also allows you to apply filters to your images. That means you could pick only those images having certain characteristics. Not only that, it also allows you to create and work on HDR pictures. Those are just a few samples of what could be done with this tool and with your creativity; you could alter the image as you wish! Yes, you can even make a shorter person look taller or vice versa. Most people shed their pounds on their photographs using the tool’s features. You could also try its varied features to understand the usefulness.

What is Lightroom?

We could say that the Lightroom is an advanced version of the Photoshop and often it is termed as the ‘Adobe Photoshop Lightroom’. This name clears our doubts that the Lightroom is an extension of the former, the Photoshop. The Adobe has thought of gifting its customers with an advanced tool to edit their images and to present it in a more realistic form. That is how the Lightroom came into existence. The major reason behind the launch of the Lightroom is that its former could not able to handle several photographs in an organized manner. But the Lightroom could do the job and you could work on hundreds of image without any issues. With Photoshop, it is impossible to pick out an image with the help of filters. All you could do is to search the thumbnails or the Meta data of the pictures and you should do it manually. But Lightroom, on the other hand, is driven by database management techniques and your images are filtered with respect to camera make, camera model, date or time when the picture was taken, shutter speed, aperture, white balance, ISO, etc. These images are usually noted as ‘EXIF’ and these EXIFs are written in another database called as the ‘catalog’. So a catalog would hold the characteristic of the images and the image by itself.

How are they similar?

As both the tools are photo editing tools, they share similarities in most of the features. Some of them are they could do a good cropping, filtering and curve adjustments as we specify. They also can edit files of types JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and RAW. They allow you to correct the distortions of the lens and the saturation adjustments. You could use a range of editing tools from basic to advance such as cropping tools, filters, working with different kinds of brushes, etc. You could also try out the artistic styles for your photographs with both these tools. Though they are similar with respect to these features, they are lots of features those remain different in each of the tools. Without those differences, there could be no need for Adobe to develop two different tools!

Differences:

• Handling and Organizing Several Photographs:

The Lightroom is capable of handling and organizing several photographs whereas the Photoshop could not do it by itself. We should organize the images manually by sorting, arranging in folders, etc while using the Photoshop. Probably, this could be the major reason for the launch of the Lightroom from the Adobe.

• How are the Edits traced?

The Photoshop saves the edited images as PSD files and it refers those files to trace the changes from the original file. The Lightroom saves the changes in the Catalog file and it is similar to a database that you could store the changes of several photographs in a single catalog file. But a single PSD file can hold only the information of a single photograph or image.

• Space Occupancy:

As a PSD file could store the changes made in one image alone, we need several PSD files one for each image. But a single catalog could store the changes of many images and hence space-wise, the Lightroom is better. Also, the catalog file is not going to occupy much space on your hard disk. Therefore, it is the better.

• Import Facility:

The Lightroom allows you to import the photographs from a memory card and then you could apply the necessary edits. But a Photoshop would not do such an ‘import’ work. That means you should import the images to your system before you work with those on the Photoshop.

• Effective Editing vs. Simpler Editing:

Though both of them support effective editing tools, the lack of import facility makes the Lightroom to be preferred than the Photoshop. If you wish to avail the simpler yet effective editing tools that come with the Photoshop, you could first import your images with the Lightroom and later edit it with the Photoshop.

• Streamlining the Workflow:

The Lightroom allows you to import and categorize your images with its built-in features. But the Photoshop could not do it by itself; it relies on other tools to do the job. When it comes to streamlining the workflow, the Lightroom does a great job.

• Which is the best for you?

Not every photographer needs the same set of tool for their editing processes. Few of them use a varied list of filters or layers while others just ignore those. If you are a person who tends to include every feature for your image by yourself, then Photoshop is the best choice. As Photoshop supports a variety of filters and other editing tools that are really powerful. If you wish to do the process with a single-click, then probably, the best choice for you is the Lightroom. The Lightroom has numerous one-click functions such as the vignette that results in the application of a set of layers to your image. In a similar manner, you could use masks or filters in your images using the Photoshop or Lightroom. The former allows you apply the layers one-by-one by yourself whereas the later allows you to do it with a single-click.

Let us look at the differences in a tabular form.