Photoshop CS3 or Adobe Lightroom for Professional Photographers

Thomas readers, who are professional photographers themselves, highly recommend Adobe Lightroom over Photoshop for managing and manipulating your RAW images.

1. Lightroom may not have the extreme polish (and speed) that Photoshop does, but it certainly saves me time when the whole workflow is considered. Heck, I’m still using Photoshop CS1 because Lightroom has taken care of all the changes I’ve required, like 30D support for example.

2. If CS3 is too expensive (which it is for a lot of people), then you can get a lot of the features above in Adobe Lightroom (for about half the price as CS3). It uses the same RAW converter as CS3, and also has some great tagging and organization tools. There’s even a simple healing brush and clone tool.

3. I use both CS3 and Lightroom…and like others have mentioned, I too prefer Lightroom. As a matter of fact I do all my RAW processing in Lighroom and only use CS3 to apply pre-created actions. Link.