Subscriptions aren’t as attractive as perpetual licenses, but when you’re paying just £98.99 at Amazon UK for 365 days of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom (PC/Mac), I think that’ll give even the most ardent subscription naysayers pause for thought. That’s roughly £4 apiece per month for industry-standard photo editing software. And if you just want Lightroom, you can get an entire year for just £61.99 at Amazon UK, which is about £5 per month.
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There’s little to say about Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Lightroom Classic that hasn’t already been said. Heck, Photoshop is so popular it’s become a verb in its own right and is known across the world by people who haven’t ever edited a photograph in their life. It’s the OG, the industry standard by which all other photo-editing software is judged.
And while Adobe has drawn the ire of many a photographer over the years for what some have considered hefty prices and unwanted subscription models, Photoshop and Lightroom are still my go-to for editing my own images because the Creative Cloud ecosystem just works. And at £98.99 for Photoshop and Lightroom, and £61.99 for Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, you’re probably paying less than your Netflix subscription!
If you’re having trouble deciding which one to go for, it all comes down to how much you’re going to use Photoshop. If you’re new to Adobe software, you might think Photoshop is essential (it’s the grandaddy after all). But most photographers, Lightroom, and Lightroom Classic have become the go-to. That’s because they’re designed for batch editing, that’s to say, you can edit lots of images simultaneously, in batches, whereas Photoshop’s layer-based workflow is largely designed for editing one image at a time.
Lightroom has also become more like Photoshop over the years. You can locally edit images using masking and even clone or heal to remove unwanted objects. Personally, I spend most of my time in Lightroom. I turn to Photoshop for things like focus stacking and to make the most of its layer-based workflow so I can make more intricate and involved edits.
Ultimately, if your editing workflow is extremely simple, adjusting a few sliders here and there, you can probably make do with Lightroom. If you anticipate doing heavy cloning, focus stacking, frequency separation, exposure blending, etc, then be sure to pick up the bundle with Photoshop.
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