Lightroom vs. Photoshop

Ever wonder why some photographers use Photoshop in addition to or instead of Lightroom? What’s the point of it? Does it really do that much more than Lightroom? Isn’t it slower?

Well the answer to all of those questions is different for everyone. There’s obviously no right or wrong way of how you structure your workflow, but for me I’ve found the most success with using both Lightroom and Photoshop together.

I use lightroom and photoshop every single image I edit. No joke. A lot of people think I’m crazy for doing it and they immediately ask “but doesn’t that take you forever??” No actually, it doesn’t. Adding photoshop to my workflow is something I’ve been doing for years and I don’t feel like my images could be what they are without it for a multitude of reasons.

Here’s a few of the top reasons why :

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.

Well, thanks for listening to all the rambling!

If you want to learn more about how I use Photoshop, check out my online Workflow Workshop coming out this month!
Stay tuned for more tips and freebies!
Bye friends!

Comments

Hillary Hausman

April 16, 2019 at 7:56 pm

Thank you for always sharing your knowledge!! Looking so forward to the photoshop actions!

Lightroom vs. Photoshop

Well, thanks for listening to all the rambling!

share this article

explore more similar articles