Adobe Photoshop, now in version CS5, was originally created as a tool for simple image editing functions. Since 1990, it has turned into an all-encompassing suite of software with many features and the ability to meet the needs of graphic designers, architects, animators, web-designers, photographers and even 3D artists. Think of Photoshop as the ideal program for photo retouching and image editing with unlimited potential and the ability to grow continuously, not only with software updates, but also with special plugins, known as “filters “, developed by Adobe and other third-party software companies.
Do you want to combine multiple pictures into a unique view? Or create an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image? Do you want to easily get rid of unwanted skin blemishes from your photos? Or maybe make it yourself look a little taller, thinner or fatter? Photoshop can do all this and much more. It would be pointless to try to list what Photoshop is capable of, probably because the list would be endless. The term “retouched with Photoshop” has now become part of our daily jargon, since we are constantly exposed to images altered with Photoshop that might seem very realistic.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is another very popular image retouching or editing software that can be considered a subset of Photoshop. It provides most of the popular features of Photoshop, in addition to some specific features that Photoshop will probably never provide. Lightroom was created with the main purpose of managing and organizing a large number of images with efficiency and simplicity. Photoshop is itself a very advanced instrument of image editing but when you edit and work with hundreds of images at a time, keeping them organized becomes a growing problem. Lightroom can be very helpful in tackling such a problem.
In comparison to Photoshop, Lightroom provides very limited features for editing and retouching images. It is more useful in managing images than editing them. However, it does come with a specific set of tools that make it easy to handle simple image editing and manipulation functions. These functions include simple cropping and basic editing of light exposure to specific adjustments depending on the lens used. A number of changes can be saved as presets and applied to other images. Each new version of Lightroom comes with new sub-modules and other features. It also comes with features for creating presentations, printing images etc.