Lightroom and Photoshop

Ok, I have searched but found nothing, what is the difference between lightroom and photoshop please?

Thank you

Here you go...

Lightroom is a combination photo developer and photo organizer/database. It can do broad global edits such as exposure adjustments, white balance, crop/rotate, noise reduction, color adjustment, and simple sharpening. It also has a rudimentary selection of tools for local adjustments, such as a very basic round brush for exposure and saturation, a simple spot-removal tool, and a red-eye reduction tool.

Lightroom's great strengths are in its organization and batch-editing features. It maintains a database of your photos, and you can rate and sort them in a variety of different ways - date, keyword, lens, focal length, rating, etc. You can also apply batch edits, so if you have a certain noise-reduction and exposure adjustment that you apply to the first photo in a set, and you know you want to adjust the rest of the set in the exact same way, it's literally two clicks to apply those settings to all the photos in the set.

Lightroom also has excellent exporting and publishing tools and plugins, to streamline the way you put photos on Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, your personal website, etc.


Photoshop is more a heavy-duty photo manipulation and graphic design tool. It lets you work on one photo at a time, and do serious changes to the photo. For photo editing, Photoshop's strength lies in the way you adjust a photo by using layers and masks, to build up changes and adjust the way the affect the photo you started with. It also has many tools to let you rearrange the contents of a photo, from cloning out a person or a bit of garbage, to swapping the head from one photo onto the body of a different photo, or using the liquify and warp tools to make a skinny person into a fat person (or vice versa, if that's your thing, I don't judge).

Photoshop also comes with Bridge, which is a supplementary software that helps keep your photos organized, though Bridge is not nearly as robust as Lightroom.

Actually they are two different things. When you install photoshop you get adobe bridge installed as well. You can compare Bridge with lightroom.

Great everyone, thank you all for the feedback, I will continue my research but my question has pretty well been answered. As an amateur photographer I think Lightroom will do me just fine.

This is incorrect.
Lightroom contains a local adjustment brush with which you can mask any area in the image, or multiple areas, and then apply a wide range of edits to that area. The parameters that can be adjusted include lightness/darkness (dodge/burn), highlight tone, shadow tone, white balance temperature and tint separately, contrast, saturation, color overlay, sharpness, clarity plus and minus (negative clarity is a softening blur similar to Lens Blur), noise reduction and moire' reduction. The mask can be applied automatically or manually (but it must be admitted that the mask selection tools are not as good as those in PS). There is also a Digital Neutral Graduated Filter that applies a straight line graduated mask across the image at any angle and adjusts all the same parameters listed above on one side of the line. In addition there is also a Clone/Healing tool, although I will admit that its implementation could surely be improved.

An example of the LR local adjustment brush at work:

A couple nights ago it was snowing here and my daughter decided to put on some goofy clothes and some goofy makeup and drag me out in the middle of the night to take some photos.

I grudgingly went out (it was 5:00 AM) and you can see the results here:

http://www.pbase.com …mar_22_2012_bec​k_and_snow

Note that her makeup was very sloppily put on but we were just goofing off!

Anyway, on one of the shots I decided crop closer and then figured I should do something about the sloppy makeup.

Rather than do something elaborate in Photoshop I decided to Keep It Simple, Stupid and just apply a "light touch" of a local adjustment brush set to Dodge in Lightroom.

The Before:

IMAGE IS A REDIRECT OR MISSING! HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif'

IMAGE IS A REDIRECT OR MISSING! HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif'

Here's another one that was done in Lightroom only.

The first one is with just general color and exposure correction. The second is a combination of a Lightroom preset (Split Tone 4), cropping, and the adjustment brush to kill all the exposure on the other people in the backgrund. I think I had to brush on negative exposure and brightness twice to completely eliminate all the background.