pennipeter wrote: Tell me what you think ... convince me. You may not need to be convinced; Photoshop might be what you need. It depends on what your priorities are. It's true that with Bridge and Camera Raw you can do almost anything you can do with Lightroom. But the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop is not about comparining the lists of features. It's about workflow. Photoshop originated many years ago designed for editing individual images in an era when images came as RGB or CMYK files from scanners, when you handled maybe tens of images at a time, and when there was one final output: print. Camera Raw and Bridge are literally afterthoughts to that history, coded much later and completely separate programs than Photoshop. Lightroom was designed for today's workflows, where hundreds of images in raw format can flood in from a camera card in one session and you might handle thousands in a year, where metadata is important, and where there are typically multiple outputs: web/social media, print, and video. So the features to support that workflow are integrated in one place. If you tend to work on a few images at a time in great detail at a pixel level, Photoshop is your program; when you need to edit raws or sync settings you've got Camera Raw and Bridge. But if you work on high volumes of raw files, Lightroom is more efficient. In Lightroom, the features in Camera Raw and Bridge are more integrated and with some keyboard shortcuts that Bridge simply doesn't have. It's much faster to pick and rate and work with collections, faster to use and filter keywords and other metadata, easier to watermark images. When you need consistent output to multiple destination formats, the way presets work for Export and Print is so efficient it really tilts the workflow in favor of Lightroom. The infinite undo history that never gets deleted is a very powerful Lightroom feature. If you need to edit a raw file, organize it with others, and print it, in Photoshop you would need to drag that image through up to four programs: Adobe Camera Downloader, Camera Raw, Bridge, and Photoshop. In Lightroom, the same tasks are done in a single program and I find this makes it easier and faster to move between whatever features I need at the time. For example, if you're printing a raw file and want to fix a problem, in Photoshop it's a long trip back to the raw controls where in Lightroom you get there by pressing one key. But the one thing that can't be argued is that if you often use tools that are only in Photoshop, you have to use Photoshop. As far as Bridge goes, Lightroom catalogs only still and video formats that come out of a camera, so if you need to catalog other formats like PNG, Illustrator, Flash, and HTML files you need to use Bridge. Hope that helps you compare the two.
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