Comments on: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom vs. Adobe Photoshop CS5

By: David Marx

David Marx — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:02:27 +0000

Dear Grammy,

The difference is that the Adobe Bridge is a multi-media browser. It was never designed for professional-grade image organization. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, on the other hand, was designed for maximum speed and efficiency. Perhaps a demonstration like the one in our tutorial on Searching with Metadata in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom will better demonstrate how much faster Lightroom is than the Adobe Bridge.

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David Marx

By: will Renfroe. UNF

will Renfroe. UNF — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:02:33 +0000

Or use bridge with precision to organize images

By: will Renfroe. UNF

will Renfroe. UNF — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:01:09 +0000

Sounds like people aren’t using image processors with PS. It is easy to edit the raw files in PS . Then batch process the images from raw to Jpeg with a push of a button into a folder created my the user

By: grammy

grammy — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:01:08 +0000

You say adobe photoshop does not organize, but it does. You can easily mark each picture or groups of pictures and more than once. You can easily put them into albums. So if I take a birthday party I can make an album George’s 3rd birthday. Than I can take all the pictures of George, but if I can also tag grandma, uncle lee,etc. Much later say on georges 16th bday, I want to make a slide show of George I can search George and come up with every picture of him i took and tagged all the way back to the 3rd birthday. If during the party I took a picture of flowers or cake or kids I can take as such and when I need a picture of birthday cake can search that. It all depends if you take a few minutes when uploading to tag and sort. So with that in mind, what other advantage is Lightroom over photoshop? I too am sorting if there is an advantage to Lightroom. Thanks.

By: David Marx

David Marx — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:51:48 +0000

Dear Melanie,

I am not sure that I can give you good advice here. If you are happy working with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 and Windows XP right now then why change anything? If there are holes in your workflow or new tools that you think will help then perhaps an upgrade will help. But Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop CS5 / 6 serve very different purposes so the next question would have to be which tools do you really need?

Ultimately the answer is going to be a more modern operating system, something that can handle 64-bit processing code, and lots more ram. Essentially I am saying that eventually a new computer is the answer by why make this leap right now if everything is working and you are happy?

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David Marx

By: Melanie

Melanie — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:52:39 +0000

So, I’m running into a problem of trying to decide what I want to get. I thought I had it all figured out until I was looking closer and found out Lightroom 4 won’t run in Windows XP. I can still get Lightroom 3 to use, but wonder if I should get CS6 instead since it will actually run on XP. The cheapest option would be to just go with Lightroom 3, second would be to upgrade to Windows 7 and get Lightroom 4, but I’m happy with XP and don’t want to upgrade until I really need to. What would your recommendation be?

By: David Marx

David Marx — Wed, 02 May 2012 03:56:03 +0000

Dear Daniela,

The difference is that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is not a graphic design program. Lightroom is a photographer’s workflow tool. It helps folks like me organize, enhance, and share photography in a fast and efficient manner. Adobe Photoshop is not strictly photographer’s tool nor is it fast and efficient. Adobe Photoshop is a huge program that serves a diverse market base of photographers, web designers, graphic designers, animator, videographers, etc. It is vastly more creative and more powerful than Lightroom.

But this creative freedom and the power come at a price. Photoshop is very hard to master and even in the right hands still a very inefficient tool for repetitive tasks like emptying a memory card or posting photos to a social media site. Each program serves its own purpose. The truly clever will learn to utilize all of these tools and more in their quest for unlimited artistic creativity.

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David Marx

By: Daniela

Daniela — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:56:22 +0000

Hi , i really want to know the principal different between lightroom and the programs of graphic design , like photoshop ..
But the differences in the edition of the photos more than the organization.
THANKS

By: David Marx

David Marx — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:17:40 +0000

Dear Michael J,

Nice to hear from you again. Glad to hear that I finally made to the top of the Google Pagerank for something!

All of these answers are just my biased opinions but I would suggest that Lightroom is the vastly superior program for photographic organization. Bridge is a far better tool when dealing with multimedia projects that include photography, audio, video, illustration, etc. Bridge is more powerful but less efficient for someone working with just photography. For image enhancement Lightroom + Photoshop + additional toys like the plugins from Nik Software is the ultimate combination.

Printing is a bit more complicated to answer. Printing from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is far easier and far more efficient especially now that Lightroom 4 offers soft-proofing. Photoshop probably gives the ultra-fine artist a bit more control but it is just so much more difficult to repeat all the steps print after print.

I think that either of these programs will play well with Perfect Resize (Genuine Fractals.) I think this but don’t know it because I gave up on that software years ago. Now that our camera’s create such high mega-pixel files, and with the interpolation improvements to both Photoshop and Lightroom, I no longer feel the need for third-party resizing software. Again just my misguided opinions and I am sure that there are blog readers out there who will vehemently disagree with all of these suggestions!

More than anything else I would recommend Adobe Photoshop Lightroom because it is a lot of fun. Once you master it working on images is fast, fluid, and efficient.

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David Marx

By: Michael J

Michael J — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 01:02:52 +0000

Wow, David Marx … I just recently came across some of my notes from your digital class @ SI, and here you are writing the first post in my google search for advice on the question Photoshop or Lightroom? (Or, both?)

Can you say a bit about whether one or the other works better for printing, particularly when using paper profiles? Does one or the other play better with Genuine Fra…er … Perfect Resize? Also, is the organizing possible with Lightroom really better than with Bridge?

thanks!