CS5 Raw Vs. Lightroom

quicklickpaddy

When I open up .NEF files in CS5 it takes me into an editing window which (judging from just the youtube tutorials) looks just like Lightroom. Aside from the organisation features in Lightroom is there any need at all to go and get it or is that feature in CS5 comprehensive enough?

Heebie

You can do everything right in lightroom if all you're doing is the basics. You only need to bring it into Photoshop if you want to do actual editing.
You can crop, take care of color, fringing, color abberations, spotting, red-eye, exposure etc.. right from Lightroom. (and do these items a lot faster, generally, and doing batch color corrections and such is a snap.)

If you prefer to bring everything into Photoshop, you can certainly do anything editing-wise there that you can do in LR.

quicklickpaddy

Oh yeah, I know that...

What I'm asking is - is the Raw editor window (completely different to opening a jpeg in Photoshop) the same as Lightroom? Or what are the major differences?

The reason I'm asking is just because it's very handy for a quick edit of photo's instead of going into Image > Adjustments > Exposure etc.

Heebie

In Lightroom, you don't actually edit the original files.. it actually makes "notes" about the changes you make & applies them to files you export out of Lightroom, and applies them for display.
Camera Raw in Photoshop does the same kind of thing.. except it imports and exports exactly one image at a time. The controls are pretty much the same, and so is the processing engine that does the work. The file-handling is obviously different.
Short answer "Yeah.. kinda like it" but it's not identical.

Lightroom keeps it's "notes" about particular files in it's catalog files. Camera Raw I think creates "sidecar" files or something similar to help it default to the same settings if you open a raw file more than once, and the sidecar files are easily lost. From a workflow point of view they can be VERY different, even though they can perform a lot of the same operations.

quicklickpaddy wrote: »

Oh yeah, I know that...

What I'm asking is - is the Raw editor window (completely different to opening a jpeg in Photoshop) the same as Lightroom? Or what are the major differences?

The reason I'm asking is just because it's very handy for a quick edit of photo's instead of going into Image > Adjustments > Exposure etc.

CabanSail

When you open a RAW file in CS5 it does it with an interface called Camera Raw. It has the same engine as Lightroom.

5uspect

Heebie wrote: »

In Lightroom, you don't actually edit the original files.. it actually makes "notes" about the changes you make & applies them to files you export out of Lightroom, and applies them for display.
Camera Raw in Photoshop does the same kind of thing.. except it imports and exports exactly one image at a time. The controls are pretty much the same, and so is the processing engine that does the work. The file-handling is obviously different.
Short answer "Yeah.. kinda like it" but it's not identical.

Lightroom keeps it's "notes" about particular files in it's catalog files. Camera Raw I think creates "sidecar" files or something similar to help it default to the same settings if you open a raw file more than once, and the sidecar files are easily lost. From a workflow point of view they can be VERY different, even though they can perform a lot of the same operations.

You can open and export as many RAW files as you want in Camera RAW at the same time. It does creates *.xmp (sidecar) files with your edits along side your RAW files.

While Lightroom lets you select your files from a library Camera RAW leaves that to the user, who may just use Bridge. Other than that they're pretty much the same.