Today’s Question: I’m used to Photoshop, so why should I consider Lightroom Classic?
Tim’s Quick Answer: For photographers who are already comfortable with Photoshop, the primary advantage of Lightroom Classic is a more powerful workflow for organizing and sharing your photos.
More Detail: Photoshop users who aren’t using other software to process their raw captures will be using Adobe Camera Raw for that purpose. Camera Raw and the Develop module in Lightroom Classic both provide the same set of tools for processing a raw capture.
After processing the raw capture, you could of course make use of the many powerful tools in Photoshop to take the image further. For Lightroom Classic users, that would simply mean sending the photo from Lightroom Classic to Photoshop to continue working on the image, just as if you had initially used Camera Raw to process the raw capture.
In this context, the real benefit of Lightroom Classic revolves around organizing and sharing your photos. While the catalog that is at the core of Lightroom Classic has caused frustration for some photographers, it also provides the benefits of being able to search across your entire library of photos very easily, and even work with your photos when the source image files aren’t available, such as when an external hard drive containing photos is disconnected.
Lightroom Classic also has an embedded map feature, so you can view photos with GPS coordinates in metadata directly on the map, which makes use of Google Maps data. There are also a variety of simple ways you can share your photos from Lightroom Classic, via a simple export that allows you to process the source image to your needed specifications, by creating a slideshow, by printing your photos, creating web galleries, or even producing a printed book.
Ultimately, however, the real power of Lightroom Classic for the photographer is the catalog that many photographers have admittedly been frustrated by. But if you take the time to learn to use Lightroom Classic properly in your workflow, it can provide considerable benefits for organizing your photos compare to Adobe Bridge, for example.