Which Program for Editing Raw Images?
It’s interesting how similar issues raised themselves in batches from time to time. Recently I have had quite a few enquiries from people wanting to know which version of Photoshop to use. What I am finding with my own work is that most of my image processing is being done in Adobe Lightroom with only some of the more advanced edits having to be done in Photoshop.
When Adobe launched Lightroom 2 (and it’s now up to version 2.6) the addition of adjustment brushes increased the processing power of Lightroom to the extent that Photoshop has
A raw image as its was shot before processing in Adobe Lightroom
almost but not quite become redundant to processing images. I would guess that something around 90% of my raw images don’t need much editing at all other than levels correction, a bit of dust removal, perhaps a little local adjustment (which is where the brushes come in) and may be correcting a skew horizon or two. I find that I’m only using Photoshop to stitch together panoramic images or work with layers when I need to. And even here I do most of the edits in Lightroom, right click the image, then select edit in Photoshop. Lightroom converts the image to a 16 bit TIFF file, opens it in Photoshop, where it or you do the necessary reprocessing and at the end of it, it opens the image in Lightroom again as a 16 bit TIFF. It stacks this new file with the original so that you can easily find them.
What I am suggesting to people now in is that instead of buying one of the top Photoshop versions, they rather get Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Elements which has the added advantage of being a little more affordable. And yes I know that
Here the images has been processed in Lightroom only.
Photoshop does have a raw converter that is a perfectly competent editing program and actually is the same raw converter engine that is found in Lightroom but in my opinion, working with in Lightroom is very much more user-friendly and logical.
So just a short one this week and if you have any specific queries in this regard is feel free to contact us.
