Editing

[bob_corby]

<p>Is Light Room a good alternative for Photoshop? I do very little editing mostly what camera raw does.</p>

[Ed_Ingold]

<p>Lightroom will do about 80% of what Photoshop does. RAW conversion is much more flexible in LR, and it's easier to handle many images in a set. All adjustments are non-destructive in LR, and only permanent if you save them in a new file. Most adjustments in Photoshop permanently change the file (unless you save adjustment layers).</p>

[frode]

<p>I bought Photoshop because I thought I needed it, but after a learning ACR I do most editing (99%, maybe more) in ACR. From what you said I would therefore recommend LR, since ACR is more like LR that PS.<br /> Btw: Any changes done in Photoshop's camera raw converter, i.e. Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) are just as non destructive as in LR (I believe they are more or less the same tool when it comes to image adjustments): contrast, colors, sharpness, cropping, spot removals, local adjustments of most settings by using a brush, noise removal, vignetting, lens corrections, perspective corrections etc. etc, most of the editing you can do in LR i believe (I have however not used LR, so I might overlook something). You can also have multiple conversions saved with one raw file in ACR (as "snapshots"), and you can make your own presets, have camera profiles, lens profiles, etc, etc. You can also edit JPGs in ACR if you want to do that. All this goes at least for PS CS6 (the last version before CC). However, if you as me only are going to use ACR, you throw a lot of money out the window. The only thing I use Photoshop for is printing ans saving, and I think printing is at least as easy in LR as in PS.</p>

<p>Cheers,</p>

[steven_clark]

<p>About the only thing about Lightroom is the UI is really, really weird for things like printing with color management. I haven't used it my self but I've tried to set up printing with profiles for somebody else and things are just in odd places.</p>