Adobe vs Adobe, Photoshop Express vs Lightroom Cc, Which one should you use?

We all know that Lightroom Cc and Photoshop express are pretty much the best mobile photo editing applications you can get on your mobile or say your I-pad.

Although both these applications are technically made by the same company, its surprising to see that there are some notable differences in the applications themselves and the output that you get after editing the same photo in bot of thes apps. Also note that for the following comparison I’ll be using the free vesion of both Lighteoom and Photoshop express and its also interesting to note that both of these apps have different things to offer in their free versions as well.

Note that I’ll not be using the overlays and healing tools that are available in Photoshop but not in Lightroom just because these still are basic editing tools and this will also make it more easy for you guys to compare bth these apps.

---

First thing to compare is the very look of these apps when yu open them and how well are these apps built in order to make it more organised and manageable for the users.

Before that this is how each of these apps look when they are first opened on your device.

As it is for photoshop, its a simple layout with options to choose your photos and also a drop down menu to choose from various different sources.

Lightroom

Lightroom is a similar setup but has more options to organise and rearrange your edits into different albums and also looks more simple and easily usable.

So as far as design , simplicity and organisation is concerned, lightroom is a bit more intuitively designed.

---

For the main editing and processing, both of these applications can support raw files and do not degrade the quality of the photo during the post processing. But there are some key differences between the resultant image that you get after performing similar edits on both of these apps.

For comparing the apps, i’ll be using three sample images that I clicked, two of which were for my instagram and the third one is to just compare how the images turn out after the very same edits on both the apps. While I have tried to make the edits as similar as possible due to few limitations on either of the apps I could not spply the exact same effects using both the apps but for the third image I only used the tools available in both.

First Image

And the following are the edited versions on Lightroom and Photoshop.

Photoshop Express

Lightroom cc

Although the cropping wasn’t exactly the same......

We observe the slightly darker tones on the Photoshoppped image where there is lesser light, say in the shadows in the bottom right corner of the image.

Its a shame that Photoshop doesn’t provide any noise reduction tool in the free version because it is such a basic tool, but lightroom does give you that so you might also observe that the Lightroom image is much less noisier.

But Lightroom lacks filters that are available on Photoshop and there are way too many filters on Photoshop.

For this image I used a Matte filter(Matte 3:+75)

Lightroom kinda makes up for this though as it supports Curves and for which I used a preset under the Curves drop-down menu named ”Flat”.

So those are basically the major differences between those images.

There is a lot in similar though. The basic colour tones in both the images are very similar with a warm look to it.

Both of them do not give selective edit support on the free vesions and hence the images have lost some details in the sky in the background and the edits have also resulted in a bit more saturated sky than it was in the original Image.

---

Second image

While the first image was what I could best make out of these apps, this image has the exact same edits done on both the applications. Also, i have only used the tools that are commonly available on both applications’ free versions.

The edits that I applied are as follows:

Exposure: -20(Photoshop) or -0.23 ev(Lightroom)

Contrast: +15

Highlights: -45

Shadows: +52

Whites: -90

Blacks: -47

Temperature: +5

Vibrance: +10

Sharpness: +12 Photoshop Express

Lightroom. Cc

And surprisingly enough, in this case it is pretty hard to tell which one is done on which, with the only notable difference in the colour of the sky in the background.

---

And now, last but not least, the in-built camera application in both the applications are quiet different.

Photoshop

Lightroom cc

We can see that Lightroom‘s in-built camera application makes it seem generations ahead, both take pretty good quality pics in daylight, Lightroom’s application allows it to adjust the parameters of the exposure triangle

(namely ISO, Shutter speed and Apperture)to still get good photos in variable lighting conditions.Also both cameras can only shoot jpeg images.

Lightroom is built so as to give a photographer complete access to all software that he/she needs to take a good photo and also get the post-processing done, while Photoshop is purely an editing tools.

Also worth noting is the fact that Photoshop offers a lot more different options to edit phots like individually adjusting the foreground and the background, overlays, filters etc. These are not readily available features in lightroom, but its not something that cannot be replicated with a lot of effort.

So for conclusion, if you are really into mobile photography and you want all the software in one place, Lightroom is the app for you. But if you are the kind of person who clicks on your camera and wants an extensive editing application, you should probably go with Lightroom.

Pro tip: Some features like the curves re available on Lightroom only and tools like perspective and healing, Photoshop on their free versions. So you can actually use both of them to technically get access to almost all the tools you require.

If you liked this comparison please do consider subscribing to my blog, its free!

Also check my website, instagram and facebook pages to see some the pictures that I click.

And if you want to see some new content related to photography, please feel free to suggest through my instagram, facebook or mail.

Thank You!