Differences and preferences of Photoshop and Lightroom

Hello again!

I have noticed that recently I get asked one question very often, and that is: Do you prefer Photoshop or Lightroom. Even without asking this question, somehow the topic of preferences between these two programs comes up very often.

Before I start telling you more about these two programs, I just want to say that everything that I will say is MY personal opinion and MY preferences. This doesn’t mean that this is the only right way, every photographer has its own workflow.

So as you probably know, Photoshop and Lightroom belong to the Adobe programs and are used mostly for photography purposes, Photoshop can be used for graphics as well.

Now I can say that I am FULL ON team PHOTOSHOP!

I personally do not like Lightroom at all. Very harsh first statement haha. So I will elaborate why. In my opinion Lightroom (Lr) is a pre-Photoshop (Ps) step. I use Lr to so to say prepare my file that I will later open in Ps and start the real work. Another way I use Lr is to import all of my photos from one session, and then I have a clear overview, I can create a preset and apply to multiple photos and see if all of them match colour-wise. After importing them I can also easily export them to small JPG files that I send to my clients to pick their final photographs that I will then retouch in Ps. So this is basically everything I use this program for. In my opinion this program became super popular in the past couple of years because it is really easy to learn how to use it and it is also available for the phone in a better version than Ps.

Preparation file.. as you might know there are different formats in which a photograph can be saved. The most known and used is of course a JPG. But what is the right way of getting to this format? The right way is to set your camera to photograph in RAW format (NEF) and NOT in JPG. What is a RAW format? Well, the word itself is giving it out a bit. RAW format is the initial format and it is the one that contains the more information of your photograph, meaning that you get a much better quality to work with later. RAW format cannot be opened just like that, and some of the programs that can open it are exactly Lr and Ps. For years I was only using Ps and I wasn’t preparing the file in Lr (I still do it sometimes, depending on the project). There is, let’s say a part of Ps that is called Camera Raw, it is the first window that pops up before you get to the Ps environment. You can also use this to prepare your file but the other way that I’m about to explain is a way that gives you a much better quality of the final work. So I import the RAW files to Lr, I create the most neutral, the closest to reality colour-wise, files and then I export them as TIF. TIF is another format that your photograph can be saved in, and it’s really really heavy, and why is that? it is because it contains THE MOST information. Very often if you print some massive formats, you will print them using the TIF format and not JPG.

Now when I explained a bit how I use this part, I will explain why I love Ps so much. First of all, for me it is just super logical and the program itself suits me much better. While I was studying architecture before getting into photography I used Adobe Illustrator (Ai) every day, and when I had to switch to Ps it made sense. It was a few years ago, today I opened Ai and got lost, haha, Ai 2020 seems to be a lot different than the one I used in 2013. Anyway, since this post is about Ps and Lr I will get back to track. Photoshop gives me a lot more freedom and options, I can work on each part of the photograph separately, and this is how you should be working very often. I mostly photograph portraits, fashion, beauty.. skincare products, and for these purposes I need to have the options of working on each element separately. When it comes to skin retouching, you really need Ps, it is impossible to be done in Lr in the same quality.

Hope this gives you a bit more of idea of how you could use these programs. Again, this is just my opinion that I have after working in this industry for almost 6 years. Let me know in the comments if this was helpful and if you would like me to cover some other topics :)

Love, Ena :)