Lightroom Or Photoshop Which To Use When?

Virtually every image these days is post-processed. By that we mean it is corrected for errors, and aesthetically enhanced after capture. Some users even go beyond and combine images to create something that did not exist, though that is more in the realm of digital art.

- Ashok Kandimalla

Even those who use JPEG image files straight out of the camera without any post-processing, need to be aware that in this case, the processing is done in-camera based on the parameters (saturation, contrast, sharpening, etc.) the user has set.

If you are post-processing on a computer as most of us do, you may recall that there are several software programs (also called apps) available to do the task. However, Adobe Inc.’s products are the most popular and are also regarded as the gold standard. While that is still the case, Adobe itself sells multiple products, some with many overlapping features. This confuses the minds of even experienced photographers.

Adobe Inc. has three main products for still image post-processing. These are Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and the very well-known Photoshop. Interestingly Photoshop was not designed as a photo-processing software. Thus, it has many features that photographers do not need and hence the consensus is that it is a complex software that is difficult to use. As a response, Adobe started an internal project and at the same time tried to create a product to compete with the now defunct Apple Aperture. These efforts resulted in Lightroom. Somewhere down the line (a few years ago) Adobe changed the business model and at the same time also recognized the need for mobile image processing. So, they introduced a new product that for good or bad, was again called Lightroom! To avoid confusion with the new Lightroom, the old one was renamed Lightroom Classic. Thus, we now have Lightroom meant for mobile image processing (hence images will be on the cloud), and Lightroom Classic which is for images stored locally on the computer. In this article, we concentrate only on the Lightroom Classic, and for brevity, we will call it LrC.