Photoshop vs Lightroom: Which One Is Right For You in 2025

Are you facing a tough time in making the right selection from Photoshop and Lightroom? Ofcourse, it’s not easy to choose the best one from two power editing programs, and it becomes more complicated when they’re the product of the same publisher. The same case is with Lightroom and Photoshop. But don’t worry, after reading this article, you can easily pick out Photoshop vs Lightroom because we’re going to highlight the basic differences in their features, ease of use, pricing plans,  skill requirements, editing capabilities, and accessibility. 

So, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a beginner or professional in your photo editing experience; you can easily select the best one from these two photo editing programs after having just a bird’s eye view of this article. Undoubtedly, you’ll choose the one that’ll give a unique and professional output due to its high-level editing ability while ignoring the pricing plan because your aim is to generate satisfied clients in the photography field. Let us discuss Photoshop vs Lightroom in detail:

If you want to know the difference between Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop and be familiar with their comparison, then this table will be very fruitful for you.

Both applications are designed to edit images and videos. That’s why the basic tools and editing process is the same, but there is variance in certain features. Due to the similarities and differences in their features many users needed clarification in making the correct selection from them. So, it’s compulsory to highlight the editing capability, basic differences in their features and their ease of use. Let us discuss:

Both have similar basic editing tools and the interface for making adjustments in different filters is also the same. Both programs have the same types of sliding scales to balance the color, contrast, brightness, exposure, temperature, tint, highlights and more. 

Photoshop allows us to create high quality visuals as well as 3D art. Its generative AI tools empower us to expand an image in any direction by dragging it through a cursor. Moreover,  we can easily replace the background of any image and can add text prompts within images.

On the other hand, Lightroom offers all the features to create high-quality graphics and replace backgrounds but without generative AI support and  users need to put an extra effort for manual editing. We can’t add text prompts within images using Lightroom.

We can easily organize our images in the database and catalog system of Lightroom because it endows us to store our pictures in the hard drive of our laptop or desktop in the form of folders and sub-folders.  We may forget the location of images due to various folders and subfolders. Still, this confusion can easily be tackled by placing the pictures of the same category within a specific folder and giving it a particular name.

On the other hand, while using a wide range of catalogs we can select “Prompt me when starting Lightroom,” and that’ll allow you to open automatically only those photos that you want to edit.

Photoshop doesn’t offer such a superior kind of catalog system like Lightroom. Due to the lack of built-in image organization tools in Photoshop, we need to use Adobe Bridge with Photoshop.  Adobe Bridge is not a decent catalog system; rather it works like an extension of the file structure in our hard drive.

In destructive Editing, the applied changes are saved over the original image, which leads to the creation of a new file. That’s why we can’t get the original image so that it could be a better practice in the editing process. In non-destructive Editing, all the changes that we apply to an image are saved separately, while the original image remains unaffected. This editing mode is very beneficial for photographers because they can easily go back to the original images.

Photoshop works as a destructive editor, and we can’t go back to the original file, while Lightroom performs the function like a non-destructive editor, We can easily turn to our original image if we find our editing work not suitable. 

As we’ve discussed above, Lightroom offers non-destructive workflows, however this feature is not available in Photoshop. But don’t worry, here is an alternative to non-destructive Editing in Photoshop that is layers and small objects. We can easily create dozens of layers on a single image in Photoshop and can apply filters and effects on each image separately without affecting other layers. 

So, all the changes are implemented on layers while the actual image remains unmodified. On the other hand, Lightroom doesn’t have a layer system, so we need to integrate with Photoshop if there is a need to insert layers.

We can easily apply saved settings of a ready-made preset in Lightroom on any image to edit it quickly if we don’t have enough time to use certain settings on each image manually and are not competent in photo editing skills. It also offers presets for  workflows like stackable that can easily be combined. In these presets, we can adjust any filter without affecting the settings of any other filters. So, we can perform post-processing very quickly and with more flexibility in Lightroom.  

Now, let us move towards the presets in Photoshop. The process of tweaking the effects of presets on images is rather complex and slower in Photoshop than in Lightroom. That’s why I personally prioritize Lightroom presets, but some photographers are more satisfied with Photoshop presets.

Batch editing in Lightroom is a very time-saving process if you want to edit the bulk of images in a few clicks. This feature of Lightroom is worth its weight in gold for professionals who have to edit hundreds and thousands of photos at the same time, especially events and wedding photographs.

Photoshop doesn’t offer any batch editing process like Lightroom.

After acquiring the knowledge from a long debate on Photoshop vs Lightroom, if you’re still facing complications in choosing the better one from Photoshop and  Lightroom, then these pros and cons of both editing programs can assist you excellently: