A lot of photographers are using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6 to process their digital images. I do use Lightroom (LR) to catalogue images, and for some very basic edits, but I find Photoshop to be much better and more versatile. In fact, if I had to choose one program or the other it would be Photoshop hands down.

There are a number of digital photograph catalogue (digital asset management or DAM) programs to help organize and find images, and I will say LR is among the best. However even the new Lightroom 6 that just came out is fine for general cropping and even some toning, but Photoshop is better for any fine work.

For example, LR does spot removal (for removing dust spots on photos) but doesn’t really hold a candle to Photoshop. Below is a crop from an image that has a dust mark:

cropped section showing dust mark
cropped section showing dust mark

Using the dust removal tool in LR:

lr-retouch

Not bad, but the branch doesn’t really look right, so lets try Photoshop’s heal tool

ps-retouch

Not perfect, but much better.

Now granted this is a very small area of an image, and further granted that it is a relatively tough area to retouch, but this illustrates one of the problems with Lightroom. 

Lightroom is very good, but it is not as good as Photoshop, and since Photoshop is only $10 per month (and you get a free version of Lightroom thrown in…) I will stick with the best image editor…

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