If you are already familiar with Lightroom, ACR’s (Adobe Camera Raw) layout will not look alien.ĪCR gives you some basic functionality that is pretty similar to what you find in Lightroom. This is Adobe’s specialized tool for reading and editing RAW files. Once you drag a RAW file into Photoshop, you see a new window with the title “Camera Raw”. Once you save your changes in Photoshop, it will automatically import the adjusted image into Lightroom. For example, if you make some basic edits in Lightroom, then open it in Photoshop through Lightroom, you will see all the changes you made in Lightroom within Photoshop.
They are meant to coexist in harmony, so that you can jump between the two when needed. If you subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan, you get both Photoshop and Lightroom. If you want to take your editing skills to a new level and gain access to a whole suite of superb tools, then you have to get into Photoshop. The bottom-line is, if you are going to make simple edits like adding or removing a few stops of light, adding contrast or saturation, sharpening or basic blurring, Lightroom does the job. In contrast, whenever you open an image in Photoshop, it has already been demosaiced and flattened, so if you make a change to it and save the document, it will either overwrite the original image (in case of JPEG), or create a new file. Whether you shoot in RAW or JPEG, the original image is always intact. It has built-in functionality for image editing, but it is also a pretty powerful photo organizing tool, which Photoshop is not.Īlso, Lightroom is “non-destructive” by nature, which means that all the changes you make to images do not get written on the image itself, but rather into the Lightroom database. Lightroom is pretty simple and has most of the functionality that is relevant to photographers. However, most photographer’s won’t care for the features that are not relevant to them, such as inserting 3D graphics, editing videos or running specialized filters. The difference between Lightroom and Photoshop is similar to the difference between riding a bike vs driving a race car. But Lightroom cannot even do 10% of what Photoshop is capable of. The answer is, almost everything that is in Lightroom is available in Photoshop. Now most of us would have asked ourselves “When I have Lightroom why would I ever need Photoshop?” All we see are unfamiliar tools, tabs and windows. On the other hand, when we open Photoshop for the first time, we feel like we are in the middle of nowhere. With a bit of exploration, we can soon get familiar with the software. With Lightroom, everything seems relatively easy to understand.
It is important to note that there is a huge difference between Lightroom and Photoshop when we open the software for the first time. Serious photographers rarely ever publish images straight out of their cameras, so the journey is usually started with basic post-processing tools like Lightroom. Instead, I wrote this article as a foundation that hopefully makes it easier for our readers to understand some of the basics. So please keep in mind that this article is not meant to be a complete guide to Photoshop. It might be a slow process, but once you get used to it, the results are highly rewarding. Once we learn a particular tool in Photoshop, it does take time and practice to put it to use. This is the right way to learn Photoshop. Instead of trying to learn everything about the software, many of us choose to only learn the particular tools that we actually need on a day-to-day basis. I haven’t come across anyone who can say “I know everything in Photoshop”. This very nature of Photoshop demands a steep learning curve.
In many cases, photographers end up showing a number of different techniques to get to the end result, which can be very confusing, especially for those who are starting out.
If you search online for a way how to get something done in Photoshop, you might be overwhelmed by what you find. In fact, Photoshop’s tools evolved so much over the years, that one could get similar results using very different tools. Without a doubt, Photoshop is a vast and complex piece of software, and there are so many built-in and third party tools available for it, that it would be impossible to try to learn it all. Even though there are many tools for processing an image, very few have come close to Photoshop in terms of features and functionality.