Lightroom frustration (incompetence)

[ErikUngerPhotography]

Since you do shoot in RAW, is it safe to assume you have used Adobe Camera RAW before you take your photos into PS?

When you edit photos in LR, it is essentially ACR but with a few added extras. LR4 has the latest version of ACR which will more than likely come with PS CS6. What LR4 has extra compared to the standard ACR is the adjustment brush tool. This is in a way to replace the brushes and layer masking of PS. Right now, it cannot do everything as easy as it would be to do in PS, but you can still do a lot with it. On the plus side, you are able to to do it all with the RAW image which still contains all that lushes information.

The only time I ever really need to go into PS now is to do some heavy cloning and healing, and perhaps very particular layer masking. Though the layer masking is quickly becoming less and less.

There are still things that LR cannot do that PS can. Depending on the image, it might require PS to get the dirty jobs done. On the other hand, LR is now letting me do a majority of the work with the RAW file preserving as much of the file as I can.