Adobe Lightroom vs Adobe Photoshop

Feature Overview: Adobe Lightroom vs Adobe Photoshop

Image Editing Tools

Although there is a lot of functional overlap between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, they are designed to meet different needs and achieve various goals as digital photography editing programs. The thousands of photos stored in your devices can be managed and processed with the help of Lightroom. To complete more substantial edits, Photoshop becomes a great tool giving you the power to do so. With Photoshop, you can create GIFs, use the liquify tool for portraits, work on 3D, and many other features are available. Lightroom’s toolkit is limited to a photo editor and image management system instead of being a graphic design studio like Photoshop.

Preset / Action

Lightroom presets and Photoshop actions are useful features in editing images. Lightroom presets save time by making ‘batch edits’, applying the same settings to countless images all at the same time. You can download a number of presets or create your own. Photoshop actions can also easily speed up the editing process but are more difficult to customize and slightly take longer to apply. Using free actions can cause some compatibility issues unlike Lightroom presets where you do not encounter such concerns.

Layers

Layers allow you to work on stacking images on top of one another to compose a single image. Lightroom does not work with layers as Photoshop does. Photoshop gives you more control over the look of the image by making more complex manipulations while working with different layers. The two programs are designed to work smoothly with each other: after the layer work is done in Photoshop, you can continue on Lightroom to complete your adjustments.

Raw File Processing

The image data from digital cameras are saved in a raw file format, meaning that it has been unprocessed and uncompressed unlike a JPEG or TIFF file. Lightroom is tailored to edit RAW images, you can easily correct and make adjustments. Adobe Photoshop comes with Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) included as a plug-in which gives the ability to work with RAW files. This could be considered inefficient because it slows down the workflow.

Image Organization

It is possible to forget about where you placed your photographs in folders or subfolders. Users can maintain the organization of their photographs with the help of the database and catalog system in Lightroom. Such features are not available in Photoshop, but you can substitute them with Adobe Bridge. Collections and Smart Collections in Lightroom are developed to ensure managing and accessing your photos easily and quickly. Photoshop lacks the ability to deal with multiple images this way.

AI Tools

Adobe has introduced a variety of Artificial Intelligence tools to Lightroom and Photoshop. This advancing technology speeds up tasks from analyzing the photos to training the data. Lightroom AI tools include automatically detecting a person, creating masks specific to their physical features, or easily removing defects to make detailed adjustments faster. AI tools for Photoshop allow users to detect and make precise selections of complex objects quickly, removing objects and backgrounds with one click or eliminating imperfections such as scratches and damage in photos.