What's the difference?
22 September. Sally talked us through many of the functions of Adobe Lightroom. When she asked who uses it, only a few hands went up.
As Sally said, Lightroom is designed for photographers. The more famous Photoshop is also useful for photographers, but in rather different ways.
At heart, Lightroom is two programs; an SQLite database and a photo editor. The database doesn't store your photo files. It stores text files which record both the position of the file on your computer and any edits you have made to each file using the develop module of Lightroom. This means your original files are unaltered in any way when you edit the image. It also means that if you move the files using the computer OS, Lightroom loses track of them and your edits get lost. So you must move them using Lightroom itself. This either makes sense to you , or it confuses you. It's one reason I don't use Lightroom, as I tend to copy and move files via the Windows command interpreter, because I'm a dinosaur and it's both faster and safer when moving a lot of files. If you never move files via the OS, you will have no problem with Lightroom losing your stuff.
Photoshop lacks the database aspect entirely. It's a pure editor. Many of it's editing features are similar or identical to Lightroom, but it also handles layers, which Lightroom does not. If you never use layers, you don't need Photoshop. What are layers?
It's easy to take hundreds of photos in a day. The best way to process most of them is to use the "Delete" key as soon as (or before) the files hit the hard drive. Most of us don't do that. So we soon find we have tens of thousands of photos. How we store and sort them depends on what we use them for. I file by date and that's it, because photos are a visual record for me - effectively a diary. Camera club stuff is less than 0.01% of what I take and unlike Sally, I don't do anything commercial with photos. (That's hard work.) If you need to find images by place taken, quality, subject and other criteria, you need a database or a consistent label and search method.
If you just need to edit images, you need Photoshop, or one of the cheaper, or even free rivals out there.
Anyway, if you buy one, you get both. Adobe no longer sells finished, stand alone versions of either program. They rent them as part of a suite of programs called "Adobe Creative Cloud", containing anywhere from two to twenty applications for visual design. You can rent a selection of these on a monthly or annual plan. The smallest selection includes both Lightroom and Photoshop for about £10 a month and licenses you to use them on two machines. (Home / office in theory-the copy on the club's PC is my "office" copy, but this year that is out of reach to members). There seems no reason two people can't share, though one must be the legal owner.
There are desktop versions ("CC") and Mobile versions of both programs.
There are free trials and student rates which may be worth inquiring about.
To see more go here. (Adobe "Creative Cloud" Uk page).
Alternatives to Adobe's programs exist.
The Freeware program GIMP can do pretty well anything Photoshop can, especially in tandem with a free Raw handler like UFRaw or RawTherapee. It's free to download and it gets better all the time. It's not the most user-friendly software, but there are lots of youtube videos showing how to use it- as there are for Photoshop.
The best free alternative to Lightroom is arguably Darktable. It has similar editing and database abilities, though it saves the edit information rather differently. Again, it takes work, but does pretty well everything Lightroom does.https://www.darktable.org/
Faststone's free Image Viewer is an excellent and fast to learn basic editor, which just might do everything you need. https://www.faststone.org/FSIVDownload.htm
Freeware office suites like OpenOffice can generate very effective relational databases, but it will take work to learn and use. Do you need one? The key to a database is consistent (and persistent) data entry. Label your files in a way they can be found by text search. If this is done consistently, a good search utility like the freeware "Everything", or even just the computer OS should be able to find stuff fast.
While Sally makes Lightroom look easy, she has been using it daily for several years. That big database of keywords took her months to compile, a bit at a time. It takes work. Don't expect it to happen overnight, but the results are impressive.
This is also interesting - how to legally use Lightroom free.