It’s not often that we write a comparison article on two products that not only work together but are also sold together as part of a package deal. There are real differences between Adobe’s two big photography applications, Photoshop and Lightroom. Since chances are good you’ll subscribe to them both, we’re less concerned here about telling you which one to buy and more about telling you which one to use, and for what purposes.
What Do Photoshop and Lightroom Do, and How Are They Different?
So, how do Photoshop and Lightroom differ? In a nutshell, Lightroom is a nondestructive photo workflow, adjustment, and management program, while Photoshop is a pixel-level, layer-based image manipulation program. It can take years to learn Photoshop, whereas getting good at Lightroom is fairly straightforward. Which one is right for you really depends on what you plan to do with it.
Further complicating the choice, Adobe now offers two flavors of Lightroom: The standard one used by professional photographers is now called Lightroom Classic, while the plain Lightroom name applies to the more consumer-friendly, cloud-synced version of the software. Because Lightroom Classic is the gold standard pro photo workflow program, we’ve chosen to pit that version against Photoshop, which is also clearly a pro-level tool.
We may pit Lightroom (non-Classic) against Adobe’s consumer-targeted photo editing package, Photoshop Elements, at a future date. Elements offers a healthy helping of both Photoshop-style editing and Lightroom-style workflow and organization tools combined with lots of guidance, but it squarely targets less-technical, less-professional level users.
How Much Do Photoshop and Lightroom Cost?
With that brief background, let’s talk pricing. Lightroom and Photoshop are available only by subscription; you can install them on 64-bit computers with a minimum 8GB RAM running macOS 10.14 Mojave and later or Windows 10 version 1903 and later. The Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan costs $9.99 per month (with a full-year commitment) and gets you both flavors of Lightroom, Photoshop, and 20GB of online storage. That’s not really enough storage for a large collection of high-res SLR images. To get 1TB of cloud storage with this plan, you’ll pay $19.99 per month. The Lightroom plan only gets you the newer flavor of Lightroom, plus 1TB storage. If you’re not interested in Lightroom at all, you can get Photoshop alone for $20.99 per month with 100GB storage. Frankly, I’m not sure why anyone would take that last option.
Finally, if you get the entire Creative Cloud subscription plan, including, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and more, you’ll pay $52.99 per month. The Photography and Lightroom plans are only available with a year’s commitment; you can get Photoshop standalone or the full suite for a single month, but you’ll pay $31.49 and $79.49, respectively. You can use a subscription on only two computers simultaneously. Photoshop Elements goes for a one-time price of $99.99, though that’s heavily discounted occasionally.
Of course, Adobe isn’t the only maker of photo software. You should also consult our roundup of photo applications, which includes more-budget-conscious products like Corel PaintBrush Pro and CyberLink’s PhotoDirector, as well as more-expensive pro-targeting software such as Capture One and DxO PhotoLab. The Adobe products undoubtedly have more name recognition, and certainly represent the state of the art, but it doesn’t hurt to investigate your options.
Photo Import and Organization
If you’re a photographer, rather than a designer, and importing and organizing your work are your goals, then you don’t need to go any further in this article: Choose Lightroom, because it’s designed to handle workflow. What is workflow? It comprises all the steps from transferring image files from your camera’s memory card to adjusting their lighting, color, sharpness, and crop to outputting the final images either for online or print.
Photoshop is not designed to deal with importing and managing your photo collection. You can use its ancillary Bridge application for this purpose, but having a single application makes for a more streamlined process.
Working with Raw Image Files
Both Photoshop and Lightroom can open raw camera files. These are files with extensions like CR2 (for Canon cameras) and NEF (for Nikon) and ARW (for Sony). They are larger than JPGs because they contain more data from your camera’s sensor, allowing for more powerful adjustment of lighting and color after the fact. For example, if you shoot in JPG, your camera interprets the sensor data and delivers its best guess as to what the image should look like.
If you edit a raw image file, you can change specific luminosity ranges like shadows or highlights using data from the original sensor capture that wasn’t used in the initial JPG rendering. This way, you can, for example, pull out the color of a bird that only appeared as a black silhouette in the initial JPG version. If you were to try this on the JPG, the information would have been discarded, so there’s no way to show that that blackbird is actually a bluebird. That’s an extreme example, but editing with raw files also lets you more convincingly, for example, bring out a shadowed face while leaving the well-exposed background alone.
If you want to create a single-shot HDR effect to optimize lighting across a photo’s dynamic range, you’ll have far superior results if you start from a raw file. Using raw files also lets you change the white balance (color warmth or coolness) after the fact; Lightroom offers an Auto White Balance button that can sometimes fix a color-shifted photo.
In Photoshop you can’t just open a raw camera image directly: When you start opening a raw image file, the separate Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) app pops open on top of the main Photoshop window with your image loaded. This gives you a sort of pre-editor, with adjustments for lighting, color, and sharpness. You then either open the result of any manipulation in ACR in Photoshop proper for further editing.
Lightroom, on the other hand, lets you import raw files and start working on them without the need for an intermediary utility. Lightroom and ACR both offer Adobe’s exclusive Raw Profiles, which determine how the original sensor data is converted to an editable image. For example, you could just use a profile based on your camera, or choose Adobe Color, Vivid, Landscape, Portrait, or Monochrome. Each tilts the result towards appropriate color and sharpness levels.
Nondestructive vs. Destructive Editing
A key difference between a photo workflow application like Lightroom and a straight-on image editing one like Photoshop is that workflow software keeps all your originals and puts any editing changes in a database that contains all your edits for every photo. In Lightroom parlance, this database is called a Catalog. Any edits you make to the photo are saved in the Catalog and associated with that image, meaning the original remains intact and accessible any time later.
When you edit an image in Photoshop, you end up with a new image at the end, and you’ll only be able to go back to the original if you save a copy. You can work around this Photoshop behavior with things like adjustment layers, snapshots, and sidecar files for raw files, but Lightroom implements nondestructive workflows automatically.
Image Adjustment vs. Image Editing
There’s a distinction between image adjustment and editing. The former means applying changes to the lighting, color, and sharpness of an entire image without adding material that doesn’t come from your camera. Editing proper concerns truly manipulating an image, making changes to particular areas, and adding content like text, shapes, or other images on top of the original. Lightroom’s forte is adjustment, while Photoshop’s is editing.
Lightroom adjustments are perfect for things like brightening an underexposed image or bringing out colors in a drab one. You can also use them to increase (or decrease) sharpness and even correct an image based on the lens you use. Lightroom does include some local adjustment tools: You can use a brush, shape, or gradient to change selected areas in an image. Cropping, too, could be considered editing rather than adjusting, and Lightroom has excellent cropping capabilities.
As for true creative editing, that’s the domain of Photoshop. For example, if you want to cut someone out of a photo or place them in another image with a different background, you need Photoshop, with its Select and Mask tools. If you simply want to lighten or punch up the color in a shady or dull area of a photo, Lightroom can do it. Either can do basic things like smoothing blemishes or fixing red eyes resulting from flash.
Some of Photoshop’s most dazzling tools are dubbed Content Aware, and you don’t find them in Lightroom. For example, if you have a photo scene containing people or objects you want to remove, Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill tool can replace the unwanted object with background material it generates by analyzing the rest of the image.
Photoshop is essentially a superset of Lightroom, since it (and its ACR utility) can do any adjustments Lightroom can. On top of those, it adds the aforementioned selection tools, along with many more options including Filters, Liquefy, Shapes, Text, 3D, and the new Neural Filters. These let you alter the look of faces or apply an effect that can make a photo look like a van Gogh. For all these rich creative tools, you must turn to Photoshop.
Layers vs. Hidden Layers
One of Photoshop’s major innovations and differentiators is its support for layers. These can be likened to placing a plate of glass with some effect or image on top of another, for a superimposition. Serious Photoshop practitioners are skilled at using dozens of layers to create an end-result image. Photographers can also use Adjustment layers to apply lighting and color adjustments that can be turned on and off separately from any other adjustments—you can enable or disable layers at will.
Lightroom hides layers from you, and this is one of the main reasons for the program’s existence: Photographers who just want to process their photos (just as in the past they’d use a darkroom) don’t want the added complexity of thinking about and managing layers.
Text, Shapes, Drawing, and 3D
Photoshop’s text options are deep, with things like stroking, glow, and even glyph editing, which lets you change parts of characters. If text is your main work, then you may want to skip Photoshop in favor of Adobe Illustrator, which works in a more text-friendly vector file format. Vector images can be resized without losing sharpness, something that’s very important when working with text.
Shapes, as design elements, are well supported in Photoshop and absent entirely from Lightroom. Again, if shapes are your thing, Illustrator may be the way to go. Drawing and Painting are similar—look to Photoshop, or even to Adobe’s excellent Fresco iPad app.
Photoshop also includes powerful 3D modeling design capabilities, which can be useful not only to designers but to game developers and technical illustrators. The program offers 3D primitives, texture mapping, and support for 3D printing.
Lightroom’s text capabilities are relegated to adding a watermark to your photo, and it doesn’t include any tools for adding shapes, drawing, or 3D modeling. For photographers, that’s perfectly acceptable, but creative and technical image designers need the added tools in Photoshop.
Mobile Editing
If you need to do photo or image editing on the run, Adobe offers capable apps for both Photoshop and Lightroom, with the latter being more mature. The company only started offering Photoshop for iPad last year, and though it lacks major features of the desktop program, it integrates well with it—you can save your work as cloud documents and open them on either platform.
The Lightroom mobile apps let you both edit and shoot photos from the devices, which extra control over shooting. On the iPhone, the Lightroom app adds the ability to save shots as raw camera files and offers nearly all the adjustments found in the desktop. Android natively lets users save in raw image format, but the Lightroom app for that platform, too, offers the full assortment of image adjustment tools.
Tethering
Tethered shooting is when your camera, usually connected with a USB cable or wirelessly via Wi-Fi, sends photos to software on your computer as soon as you shoot them. This allows you to see the full-size images and to start working on them, cataloging them, or sharing them immediately.
Lightroom Classic is your go-to for tethered shooting, while Photoshop doesn’t have this capability. Nor does the newer, consumer-friendly version of Lightroom. Other software that supports tethering includes Capture One, CyberLink PhotoDirector, and ON1 Photo RAW.
State-of-the-Art, Ever-Evolving Tools
Occasionally, Adobe adds new state-of-the-art features only to Photoshop. Examples include the Camera Shake Reduction tool (which, in testing, turned out to be less magical than it initially sounded) and the recent Neural Filters tools, which use AI to alter faces and apply art style transfer to your images.
Despite this, Lightroom gets plenty of update love from Adobe. The Enhance Details tool, which landed last year, processes raw image data to draw out more sharpness. Lightroom also got a nifty Texture slider, and more recently, new color grading tools and local hue adjustment tools arrived.
You Don’t Need to Choose
The choice between Lightroom and Photoshop is not a decision of which product you should buy—both come with Adobe’s $9.99-per-month Photography Plan subscription—but rather a matter of which you should use. The answer may well be to use both. For getting the images from your camera card, organizing them, and fixing the lighting, crop, and color, Lightroom is your go-to. For deep image manipulation like removing people and objects from a photo, adding shape and text overlays, and applying artistic filters, you’ll want to use Photoshop. Choose Lightroom for pure photography needs, and Photoshop for design and creativity.
