Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 for Digital Photographers Only

Chapter 12. GOING BETWEEN LIGHTROOM AND PHOTOSHOP

As I worked on the first edition of this book and learned to master Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1, I got a lot of questions about Photoshop itself from photographers who knew I was doing this. The big question was, "If I have Lightroom, do I still need Photoshop?"

That was not a simple question or an easy one to answer. "It depends" is rarely a satisfying answer, yet then, it really was true. With Lightroom 2, that question is easier to answer. The addition of local controls makes Lightroom a fully capable program for most photographers. There are reasons to use Photoshop, but frankly, many photographers will be perfectly happy never going to Photoshop. Any photographer who needs to do a lot of compositing, however, must go to Photoshop as Lightroom has no compositing capabilities. I think many photographers will even find that Lightroom now does so much for them that they only need Photoshop Elements, not even Photoshop, for occasional work in layers.

Adobe makes it easy for these programs to work together — in fact, that is part of the reason that Photoshop is included in the official name, Photoshop Lightroom. But remember that Lightroom and Photoshop are designed for very different purposes. Lightroom is a program for dealing quickly and easily with a lot of photos, and then working on them fluidly from one to another. It is not a ...