01. You get to put fresh eyes on your images again. Ever edit something and then a couple months later you look back at those images and think “What was I doing?? Why is everything so pink? The greens are all whacky!” Well, that’s because you have fresh eyes. I look through all of my images 4 times before delivering them (culling, lightroom edits, reviewing lightroom edits, and photoshop edits). When you take a second to step back after staring at your screen for hours then come back to the edits your eyes won’t be so numb. I recommend doing this regardless of whether you use photoshop or not, but this is my version of getting fresh eyes on my work.

02. Photoshop has different capabilities than Lightroom. Lightroom is great, and I’m not sure why Adobe hasn’t combined the two program’s capabilities into one program yet, but there’s features that Photoshop has that beat Lightroom in my opinion. I use Lightroom for the heavy lifting of color correcting, but I feel that Photoshop has more to offer as far as control goes with the layers feature. I use layers like crazy when I edit and that way I can really fine tune every little thing I do to my images and it’s a lot faster than using Lightroom’s slow-moving versions of these features.

03. Photoshop actually doesn’t take that much time if you know what you’re doing. It’s a beast of a program and can be really scary if you’re jumping in trying to teach yourself (I’ve been there) but like anything else, the more you practice the easier and faster it becomes. I created my own Photoshop Actions that I rely on which makes editing everything through Photoshop again crazy fast and streamlined. I’ll be offering these actions along with the Workflow Workshop launch so you can try them out while I teach you everything I know about Photoshop!

04. I truly can’t get the exact look I want for my final images in Lightroom alone. It’s actually very common for photographers to layer the use of another program on top of their Lightroom Workflow like Photoshop or Alien Skin. Presets in Lightroom get my images about 85% of the way there and Photoshop is like the extra little magic fairy dust I sprinkle on top that gets my work to its full potential. No, it’s not necessary, I still feel my images look great without it, but I love the depth and quality it adds to my images by implementing it into my workflow.