Originally Posted by
Manfred M
Ted & Brian - it's all about the right tool for the job.
At one time Adobe thought it had three specific market segments and built three very specific products that would handle those specific target needs:
The amateurs were covered by their Photoshop Elements line.
The retail photography market; the part of the market that sold directly to the public; portrait photographers, baby photographers and wedding photographers, whose needs were minor tweaks that couple be accomplished with little time or effort with a high degree of being able to automate functions. This is the group of photographers that Lightroom was targeted at.
Finally, there was the commercial segment where the buyers were sophisticated and knowledgeable corporate clients that demanded absolutely perfect images for use in publications and advertising materials. This is the market niche that Photoshop was targeted at.
Over time these lines have blurred. As an example, retail photographers who offer high end products (i.e. large prints) will use Photoshop to create these products. Advanced amateurs and photographic artists (a.k.a. "Fine Art Photographers") use whatever tools they have mastered to create their works and will use high-end tools to achieve their results.
The various other commercial and open source products provide alternatives to the Adobe products. The proprietary commercial products run on the Apple and / or Microsoft operating systems. Open source operating system users (i.e. Linux) have to use open source software like Gimp, DarkTable, RawTherapee, etc, most of which have been ported to MacOS and Windows as well. Commercial, proprietary software developers have no incentive to open source their software so these programs are not available in the Linux world.
So this is all about the right tool for the job at hand. Along with the tools goes the knowledge and skills to use them.
If you are fine with the results you get from using a parametric editor, great. You have a tool that you are comfortable with and can achieve results that can be accomplished within the capabilities of that type of tool. The hundreds of thousands of wedding, portrait and baby photographers seem to be able to create products that their clientele buys from them.
If you want to get to a higher level in your work, then you should consider going to the next step. One highly regarded fine art photographer once told me that the difference between a good image and a great image is all about handling the local (small) details. If one looks at the works of the great photographers of the past; for instance Ansel Adams, that is exactly how he worked by spending hours and hours burning and dodging the local details. Parametric editors don't have the tools to do this well; this is the realm of pixel based editors with adjustment layers, blending modes and layer masks.