From filters on Instagram & Snapchat to using Photoshop or Lightroom, there’s a number of ways you can approach editing your photos!
Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop are two programs that many professional photographers choose to use. So what’s the difference and what do you need?
What’s awesome about Lightroom?
More and more people have started using Lightroom in recent years, a large part due to its ease of use, user-friendly interface and much more! Here are a few great things about Lightroom you should know
1) Cataloging your photos
After a day of shooting, you can have hundreds of photos (or more!) and sorting through them one by one would be painful! Lightroom gives you an easy to read layout that allows you to screen & pick your photos before bringing it into editing. Also, you can easily export whole photos albums at once, watermark it with ease and much more. If you have A LOT of photos, Lightroom is great for you!
2) Quick & Easy Processing
One of Lightroom’s biggest strength is its ability to process photos very easily. From readjusting your white balance to adding simple filters, the tools in this program has everything you need to make basic adjustments. The latest version of Lightroom even has tools to fix colour fringing (lines of purple or green light that appears in the outline of the subject due to chromatic aberration from your light source hitting your lens) and to “de-haze” your photo (a smart tool that readjusts a layer of “haze” that may effect the contrast of your photo).
3) Works with RAW files & is non-destructive
Lightroom does not edit the original files when you are working on them! Unlike Photoshop (which does not work with RAW files), Lightroom does not save overtop of photo file your are editing.
 What about Photoshop?
Photoshop has been around since 1990 and has been widely used since! It has evolved to a very powerful editing program and you can do a lot more detailed editing than Lightroom. Here are a few reasons we use Photoshop:
1) Retouching & Restoring Photos
Although Lightroom has some retouching capabilities, Photoshop is much better in this aspect because it offers more tools! With a number of different brushes, stamps, tools and the ability to set Actions (the ability to create a preset of steps you want Photoshop to carry out with a click of one button), you’re able to edit a photo at a very detailed level.
2) Content-Aware Technology
Photoshop has very powerful content awareness, so what is it? Content awareness technology in Photoshop allows us to use a number of different tools to select certain objects within your photo and change (or delete) them with ease! See someone in the background of your portrait? Need to need make a building look taller? Want a random bird taken out of your landscape photo? Photoshop can do it!
3) Photo Manipulation & Compositing
Compositing images is the process of bring 2 or more images together and Photoshop is amazing at this! You can composite something as simple as replacing a closed eye with an opened eye from another image for your group photo. If you want a high quality panorama (not just on your phone), you can take a number of photos on your camera to capture the whole landscape, and Photoshop can help you piece all the photos together for you! Other tools allow for text, shapes, lines and much more!
So which program fits your needs?
Depending on what your needs are, you may use Photoshop more than Lightroom, or vice-versa! Either way, we don’t recommend just using one program over the other. Many professional photographers, including us, use both programs for various reasons.
Weigh out the pros and cons of each program, and see what your needs are! It never hurts to arm yourself with more tools as a photographer!