The Challenge

Somehow the Brit's have some really fine magazine publishing houses. The quality of print is phenomenal compared to our nearly newsprint quality paper. Yet again they are two to three times the cost. Often though they come with a CD of information...  Some useful mostly not though. One such rag is called Digital Camera. The reason I mention it is they usually have a challenge with supplied before images to work on and see if you can come up with your own spin on the image editing thing. So here we go...

BEFORE

Here is the "before" image to which we are to apply our tricks and techniques to do a digital makeover. The additional challenge I gave myself was to see what I could do in a limited amount of time. Not only in Photoshop, but in Lightroom as well. At first look one would think how much work does this young lady need. When zoomed in it it revealed that she must be a descendent of some primate family cause she was flat hairy. But the challenge still stood. Masking, clone stamping, high pass filtering, gaussian blurring, healing brush, healing stamp and after forty-five minutes here is what I came up with in Photoshop CS3.

PHOTOSHOP

I liked what I saw... Nice and clean, soft, and sharp in all the right places. Now part of the problem was the image provided was a RAW file that would not work with ACR 4.5 so I imported it into Lightroom. The only RAW processing I did was in Camera Calibration and loaded the Canon Portrait Preset. From there I made a virtual copy and took one of them into Photoshop.

Soooo... What to do about the Lightroom version? After making the return trip to Lightroom with the Photoshop "edit" copy I went to work on the other "unedited" copy. And here is what I came up with in the same amount of time:

LIGHTROOM

Yowzer... That is a bigger difference from the unedited image and the Photoshopped image. All in Lightroom 2.0. Working only in the Develop Module (it's the only editing part of LR) the only global adjustments made were in Clarity, and a post crop (even though I did no cropping) vignette. I might have warmed it up just a tad in the white balance but i cant remember. The rest of the adjustments were by means of the localized adjustment brush and the spot removal tool (both cloning and healing). All in all there were 11 uses of the adjustment brush and 108 uses of the spot removal tool. I don't know the ratio of healing vs cloning though.

Why are these two images vastly different? Time... In Lightroom I was able to get to where I was in Photoshop sooner and spent the rest of the time tweaking the image further.

So what am I saying here. Is Lightroom better than Photoshop? Looking at these two images it might appear that way but really not. Besides I am not trying to prove here one is better than the other. What I am saying though is that Lightroom gives the photographer the tools necessary to generate a high end product without having to go into Photoshop. If you think about it though, the brain trust at Adobe spent many moons and a bunch of bucks developing a product specifically for the photographer. 

The bottom line is that Lightroom is a better tool for this particular job because it makes the work more efficient. If I wanted to go any further, it too would have made a trip to Photoshop.

Cya... Doug

P.S. As I have spoken of before, using ACR 5.x with CS4 would generate the same image as the Lightroom version above. It is simply that Adobe has handicapped every Photoshop user below CS4 by not letting them into the ACR environment.