Lightroom or Photoshop?

[Peter McLennan]

Supposing you add LR to an existing CS5 install.  What happens to all your legacy Bridge-created data?  Do you need to import all your images into LR?  Does this mean that you now have two huge databases? 

[john beardsworth]

You catalogue all the files in Lightroom (it reads the existing data) and then more-or-less stop using Bridge.

John

[Mark D Segal]

Supposing you add LR to an existing CS5 install.  What happens to all your legacy Bridge-created data?  Do you need to import all your images into LR?  Does this mean that you now have two huge databases? 

You "import" into LR only the images you want in the LR Catalog. In fact, you aren't necessarily creating a huge database. If you import them from their current location (on the hard-drive) the photos themselves remain there and they are not duplicated. The LR "database" consists of the the thumbnails and the metadata for the images, including the history track of what you do to them once they are in LR. So say a 25 MB raw file would just take a few KB in an LR catalog.

[David Eichler]

I am returning to digital printing after an unavoidable several year absence and therefore am way out of date on the question of how photographers are handling the relation between Lightroom and Photoshop for photo editing.  When I "left" Lightroom had only just been introduced, and while I had become fairly proficient with Photoshop through CS2 I did not get started with Lightroom at all.  Now with a new Mac and newly back into digital printing, I need to know whether to convert and upgrade my PC version of CS2 and continue using it, or switch to Lightroom 3, or use both--all unanswered questions when I left the discussion.

I'd appreciate some commentary on what people are preferring, with apologies for being so out of date!  Many thanks.

Randy

Impossible to answer without knowing what kind of photography you do. Photoshop is a  vastly more powerful image processing tool than Lightroom. As much as I like and rely upon Lightroom to speed up my workflow and keep track of my library, if I had to choose between them, I would choose Photoshop.