Robert, have you tried a 100% LR workflow from ingestion to Print using all of LR's capture sharpening, output sharpening, softproofing and resizing capabilities? If so, what did you find wanting about it that you need to go all these other steps?
Hi Mark,
Lightroom is great, but there are many things that are more easily done in Photoshop than Lightroom (and vice-versa), and there are some things that cannot be done in Lightroom but can be in Photoshop. As just one example, it's very difficult to sharpen in Lightroom with an edge mask - with a great deal of time and effort I suppose one could do it with the adjustment brush, but it's a very inefficient way of doing it. On the other hand, it's something that can be done in seconds in Photoshop, using an action.
I tend to work with both Lightroom/ACR and Photoshop together: initial development in Lightroom, then Photoshop with a raw smart object so that I can continue to use the nice ACR adjustments (including sharpening) while having the full power of Photoshop (or I use the Camera Raw Filter); I also use Lightroom to manage all of my pictures, including the ones that have been developed in Photoshop, and I use Lightroom for web, printing, slideshows, map etc.
There are times when I do nothing to an image in Photoshop - but to keep my workflow consistent I still use the Lightroom/Photoshop/Lightroom workflow. I certainly wouldn't do this if I was a wedding photographer, say, as it would be ridiculously time-consuming ... but I'm not. I'm a landscape photographer and my ratio of developed images to raw images is tiny.
Robert