What PS feature would you miss most if you used LR only?

Hi folks,

I recently decided to upgrade from a little point-n-shoot canon to a new XTi, and I'm loving the quality of this camera. I'm now faced with the challenge of getting comfortable with a workflow that works for me.

I've done some photography in the past, and have worked with photoshop a fair amount (though I don't currently own a copy). When I bought my camera I downloaded the lightroom trial and find that it's a pretty amazing tool.

I find that it can do almost everything I need just in lightroom: raw processing (color correction, etc), cropping, straightening, resizing and exporting. I also really like the non-destructive editing and virtual copies functionality it provides. They let me develop images in a variety of ways and compare them very easily.

When shooting I definately take advantage of digital shots being "free" - I shoot a lot of pictures, and plan on culling out the junk when I get home, and I really like lightroom for sorting through all the pics. I tried processing the results of a day of shooting using the CS3 trial (~200 pics), and found it to be much more tedious to sort through them all, make tweaks to the images as I was going, and rank the results of the day's shoot.

However, it seems popular opinion is that lightroom doesn't stand on its own, and I can certainly see a lot of things that photoshop can do that obviously can't be done in lightroom.

Given that, my question for you is this: What feature from CS3 would you miss most if you used lightroom only?

Thanks in advance for your input,
-Fin

so many to choose from:

Layers, filters, and effects (like Frames) would be my biggest ones. (Though with LR, I rarely go to use even those.)

That said, I'd argue you don't NEED to force yourself to only use LR: you could always use some other program to do those things rather than full-blown CS3:

The Gimp: Free!
Photoshop Elements: Relatively cheap, supports majority of plugins for Photoshop.
Corel Paintshop Pro XI: Even cheaper, though apparently not as widely used.

Edit: after seeing other posts, put a duh! on my forehead.... selective adjustments!

Selective adjustments.

selective adjustments too

actions. I've automated so much of my work.

Forgive the possibly stupid question, but what are you referring to as "selective adjustments"? Is that localized adjustments done with selections/masking, or do you mean color localized by channel or something similar?

DavidC - you make a good point about considering something lighter weight than CS3 to supliment lightroom. Does elements integrate smoothly with lightroom like the full blown photoshop does? I've seen some mention of being able to attach actions to the end of export commands from elements (something like applying a USM to each image as you output for the web, etc), can that be done with elements as well? Sharpening is one of the things that I think I would miss most, since it seems that even with lightroom 1.1 the sharpening is not a replacement for USM style finish sharpening. If LR and Elements integrate well perhaps that's a good solution that doesn't completely blow my budget.

-Fin

Fin015 wrote in post #3475641
Is that localized adjustments done with selections/masking,

Yep.

Fin015 wrote in post #3475641
Forgive the possibly stupid question, but what are you referring to as "selective adjustments"? Is that localized adjustments done with selections/masking, or do you mean color localized by channel or something similar?

DavidC - you make a good point about considering something lighter weight than CS3 to supliment lightroom. Does elements integrate smoothly with lightroom like the full blown photoshop does? I've seen some mention of being able to attach actions to the end of export commands from elements (something like applying a USM to each image as you output for the web, etc), can that be done with elements as well? Sharpening is one of the things that I think I would miss most, since it seems that even with lightroom 1.1 the sharpening is not a replacement for USM style finish sharpening. If LR and Elements integrate well perhaps that's a good solution that doesn't completely blow my budget.

-Fin

If you're referring to "droplets" to automate a common task in after export from LR, then no, unfortuantely Elements cannot.

And yes, Elements, Gimp, and PSP all have USM, I think Elements 5.0 may even have "smart sharpening". But with any of them you can do some of the more advanced sharpening such as edge-sharpening, etc. (I haven't tried out LR's new sharpening extensively, but when using it, make sure you are at 1:1, and also try holding the alt (apple command key) when adjusting the sliders... it gives you a better idea of what each is actually doing... (I think the Masking slider is actually like defining an "edge" mask, essentially doing edge sharpening right there in LR!)

Otherwise, any program actually integrates just fine with LR... and you can select from (at least) two programs to export to. LR will automatically recognize Elements as one of the options.

Basically, what happens is LR creates an exported file (.psd, .tiff, or whatever), with "edited" appended to the filename, and adds that image to the database. It then opens that image in your selected application. As long as you save file out with same exact name and extension, LR will see the edits when it updates its thumbnails and previews.