As I said in an earlier post I am an Adobe CC subscriber, and use Lightroom Classic CC as my main photo editor. I have played around with Lightroom CC, however it doesn’t have the full suite of tools that are in the Classic version, although I have found the cloud sync useful. I expect that gradually it will catch up with Classic over time as I assume that is the direction that Adobe eventually wants to take us.

Now Adobe Photoshop is a product that I am slowly using more and more for my image editing, to date I mainly used it with the full suite of Nik plugins, that I purchased well before Google got their hands on them.

After having watched a lot of videos on YouTube over the last 6 months or so, I am now getting into Luminosity Masking, so much so that I decide to invest in one of the many Panels that are now available to purchase. My research eventually came down to two contenders, and after much deliberation, I finally picked Lumenzia which is developed by Greg Benz.

I have been using it now for a few weeks and I am delighted with the results that I am seeing from my images. I realize that all of the functions of the panel can be performed in Photoshop without it, but it saves the need to spend hours learning the procedures to achieve the final outcome. So, all in all, I am very happy with the tool and what I can do with it, in much the same way as when I started to use the Nik Plugins.

The blending of bracketed multiple exposures is something that I have performed for a long time, using either HDR Efex Pro or merge to HDR in Lightroom or Photoshop, with some mixed results, some pleasing while others have been ghastly. Now exposure blending in layers in Photoshop has so far given me a much more realistic output that I am very pleased with. The image below was blended from two exposures in Photoshop using Luminosity Masking and contrast added using the Pro Contrast in Nix Color Efex Pro 4, with a little vignette added in Camera RAW.

Olympus EM-1 12-40mm F2.8

The next image was created in Lightroom using Merge to HDR also from the same two images, on further inspection, it doesn’t look as natural, you can see that the highlights were blown in the sky to the left of the church. You can also see that the saturation was boosted and a slight increase of distortion, not easily detected unless you view them in Lightroom in Compare View.

Olympus EM-1 12-40mm F2.8

I expect that I will be using Photoshop more and more for image blending and other editing processes. It’s not that I am unhappy with Lightroom, it’s just Photoshop is a very powerful tool that I have neglected to sit down and learn, I think it can only help me improve my image workflow.

What do you think, do you use Lightroom in combination with Photoshop? Maybe you have been a Photoshop user for years and have never adopted Lightroom preferring to use Bridge and Camera RAW, let me know in the comments below.

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