Photoshop has been the predominant application for most all digital imaging tasks over the past 20 years. Its evolution paces the introduction of and the advances made in digital cameras. So rightfully, Photoshop has been the obvious image editor of choice whenever we want to 'improve' our digital pictures.

Nevertheless, editing photographs in Photoshop has always been somewhat problematic. First, there is a steep learning curve for all who intend to harness this complex application. And, until recently, it was nearly impossible to affect a digital image without the potential for degrading or even destroying the original in the process.

With the advent of Adobe's Camera Raw plugin (ACR, in PS7) 'nondestructive' manipulation was introduced to digital photo editing. At last photographers were able to make image adjustments and have the ability to always revisit the file later for additional tweaks or changes even after a raw file had been exported to Photoshop with its current settings and closed. However, with the release of Adobe's Lightroom application, in 2007, truly dynamic nondestructive image editing became a reality.

What makes Lightroom so profoundly different from its parent application is its breakthrough approach to image processing.

Unlike Photoshop, which edits (manipulates) pixels, Lightroom writes instructions to a text file attached to the image. And the history of what you have done within Lightroom's Develop module remains with the image files you work on – even after you close out of the application. This is extraordinary!

So instead of having to save multiple variations of an original file one is utilizing as the root for their work – potentially hundreds of megabytes-worth of pixel data between the series – Lightroom saves only kilobytes-worth of instructions to display one's variations precisely as saved within this remarkable application. By utilizing Lightroom's ability to create 'Virtual Copies' we can save as many variations of an original image file as we care to while barely affecting the amount of data we are storing on our computer's hard drive. (More about Virtual Copies in Lightroom here.)

Lightroom affords all the same powerful editing tools to TIFF's, PSD's and JPEG files as well, making LR the perfect transitional resource for individuals currently working with point-and-shoot cameras aspiring to shoot with more professional equipment producing Raw files one day in the future.

Over the entirety of my career providing location scouting as a production service to the film industry, I had used Photoshop to edit and enhance my work. I used Photoshop extensively (along with Dreamweaver) to design a more engaging website for the presentation of my photo files to clients and other visitors. But when Adobe released its initial version of Lightroom it was a game-changer for me. I can build clean, sophisticated and engaging web galleries and slideshows I export as 'movie' files with a soundtrack if I so choose, quickly and more easily in Lightroom alone!

I now only use Photoshop for specific pixel editing tasks. The rest of my work is conducted so much more efficiently in Lightroom.