About a year ago, I was sitting in a café in Harare, Zimbabwe. I spotted an artsy-looking guy with a Canon EOS 1D at a table across from mine and, as I’m a photographer, we got to talking. Turns out he was Rob Cooper, the famous wildlife photographer. He’s made the cover of Time magazine with his political photographs. After talking for a while, we got around to post production. I mentioned that I liked to use Lightroom, Adobe’s professional photography suite. He dismissed the idea and said that for a professional photographer, Photoshop was a better all-in-one tool.

lightroom vs photoshop

Now, I’m an avid Adobe fan and have been using the software since Art school. But when Lightroom came out, I fell in love with the software. However, many professional photographers shun the product, arguing that it’s simply database software with similar primary features to Photoshop.

In comparison with Rob, I’m an amateur. But I enjoy Lightroom because it has a brilliant camera compatibility function. I upload my photographs straight into a new catalogue. It is easy to store work, organise and reopen files, especially because at the moment I’m interested in documentary-style photography, and I’m currently taking large quantities of photographs. I often have an enormous amount of shot footage that can be a headache to reorganise on my computer. This ‘database’ style function is brilliant for what I need. (check out Lightroom 3 review for more details).

The post production or development stage of Lightroom is quite exciting as it is designed to give the user a sense of developing photographs in a non-digital age. In other words, the layout makes you feel as if you’re actually in a darkroom. I shoot in RAW format and I then have the option to basically retake the entire photograph in the developing stage. I can easily adjust aperture, fill light, tone, colour temperature, contrast, etc., and it gives me an instant preview of the image. It is true that Photoshop has the same functions, but I prefer the layout of Lightroom for the purpose of developing an image quickly.

I use each of Adobe Suite’s individual packages for different reasons. I find that I tend to use Photoshop CS5 professionally when designing graphics, use Illustrator for sketching up drawings, and Lightroom for developing photographs. So why is my new friend Rob Cooper so avidly against Lightroom?

Different Adobe software are used for different purposes, but maybe professional photographers are content with Photoshop because they do not want to buy two products with basic features that overlap. Lightroom has only been available since 2007. Maybe professional photographers have adjusted to using only Photoshop.

Many designers have said that the product had an identity crisis, Adobe changed Lightroom to Photoshop Lightroom, mostly because the product was not branded properly, or possibly that it couldn’t compete with the complexity of Photoshop. So Lightroom was treated more as an add-on—an add-on to Photoshop.

I realise that Lightroom will never replace Photoshop because it can’t edit multi-layered images, and doesn’t have the same astounding in-depth tool functionality required to edit and manipulate images. However, I still believe that if you simply want to develop a batch of photographs efficiently in a very organised framework, Lightroom is the way forward. Depending on how much and what type of post production work you do, it is a brilliant tool. It is very easy to use for enthusiastic amateur photographers.