Power of Lightroom for editing

[DanK]

There has been a lot of back and forth on this forum about how much editing one can do in Lightroom (or Camera Raw), without using a pixel editor like Photoshop. Some say not much, some say a lot. My own view is that the past couple of years of development of Lightroom has dramatically increased how much editing one can do.

today I stumbled on an example of this. Some of you may be familiar with Christian Mohrle, who posts videos of his doing complete edits in Lightroom. Today I found one about editing a photo of a forest that is a great example of the power of Lightroom:

https://fstoppers.com/lightroom/how-...ghtroom-681740

I found it interesting also because he does more substantial and creative edits than I would think of on my own. For example, in this one, he works on colors using the WB slider, color range selections, saturation, the color mixer, split toning, and the calibration panel (which I am only now beginning to learn how to use). it's well worth a watch, although it's about 13 minutes.

[LenR]

Dan, I concur with you observations regarding LR editing.
Thanks for sharing the link to Mohrle's informative video....

[Manfred M]

I agree that Lightroom (specifically, the Develop module) and its older sibling, Adobe Camera Raw (and Photoshop's Camera Raw filter) have had significant improvements over the years.

The downside is that these tools are becoming much more complex, but the incremental additions have made these fairly easy for experienced users to absorb. In the past, folks criticized Photoshop's complexity and I find that in general it is faster and easier to use than the parametric editing tools. I also find that Adobe isn't clear enough as to the (side) effects of the functionality and it takes a lot of playing around to figure things out.

I still find that the power of Photoshop lies with its more advanced selection tools, layers and blending modes. We have certainly seen other parametric tools (Capture One, for example) that have introduced some of these tools into their software.

As I've said many times, the results matter, the tools one uses to get there are up to our individual preferences.

[DanK]

I still find that the power of Photoshop lies with its more advanced selection tools, layers and blending modes.

I agree. When I go to Photoshop, it's usually for one of these things or for the much better touch-up functions. However, I need it far less than I used to. The sort of stuff Mohrle shows was simply not possible in Lightroom a few years ago.

The balance for me is different than for you because I rarely print in Photoshop. I find the print module in Lightroom produces excellent results, and it is far easier to use, in particular because of its template functions and virtual copies. Normally, when soft proofing, I make a soft-proof copy, which shows up as a virtual copy proofed to a particular paper. So, if I want to re-print on the same paper, I just select the correct virtual copy, select the right template in the print module (which contains all settings from both lightroom and the printer's firmware, and print. The first print can take a while, but subsequent prints are trivial.