After Photoshop 7, C3, and C4 I discovered Adobe Lightroom 2.0. It is a terrific product but unfortunately requires quite a bit of processing power and disk space. Adding disk space is easy but my old P4 processor is what it is. So I researched and decided I want the Intel i7 processor. I won't buy another computer until the i7 becomes affordable for common folk like myself. So I wait and each month check the Dell web site to see how much the price has dropped. It's going to be a long wait but spending $2300 on a laptop is more than I want to part with.
anyway, this is about Adobe Lightroom 2.0, not computer pipe dreams.
I find myself staying in Lightroom for almost all of my work; rarely opening an image in Photoshop. Both programs have strong points but, for me, Lightroom is the easier of the two.
My favorite Lightroom tools are:
Histogram and Tone Control (most excelent)
Image Sharpening (much better than photoshop)
Brightness contrast
Noise reduction (Photoshop has more extensive controls)
Hue/Saturation adjustments (The best)
The Presense options : Clarity, Brightness, contrast (indespensible)
Lightroom by design is a photography database file management system that does non destructive photo editing, assigns Keywords to images, and groups images into folders.
Beyond the above editing features almost all of my printing is done in Lightroom. The slide show and WEB builder tools are very useful and I think a bit better than photoshops WEB tools with the one exception of Image Ready which can build animated GIF files and the image file optimizer/resizer for files destined to be used on a WEB site.
What I don't like about lightroom is the lack of any selection tools for isolating image retouching work. The selection tools in Photoshop are the primary reason I still use Photoshop. Printing from Photoshop is equal to lightroom's Print tool.