If you've ever felt confused deciding whether to use Photoshop or Lightroom for color adjustments, you're not alone. Adobe’s latest updates have added to this confusion by offering overlapping color editing features in both apps.
Coming to you from Matt Kloskowski, this insightful video tackles Adobe’s newly updated "Adjust Colors" tool in Photoshop and clarifies when you should—and shouldn't—use it. Adobe recently introduced Adjust Colors to simplify color editing by quickly isolating prominent colors, offering you fast access through a simple wheel interface. However, Kloskowski quickly shows that this apparent convenience can become problematic, demonstrating how easily Photoshop's Adjust Colors leads to exaggerated, unrealistic results. He points out that even moderate adjustments using this tool can quickly become oversaturated and unnatural. Kloskowski illustrates this vividly with a landscape photograph, showing how boosting greens can rapidly turn foliage into an unnatural, fluorescent shade, and similarly, how intensifying blues quickly makes skies appear harsh and unrealistic.
Kloskowski suggests a far superior alternative: Lightroom’s targeted color adjustment features. Using Lightroom Classic’s Point Color within the Color Mixer panel, he demonstrates significantly better control and subtlety. Adjustments in Lightroom maintain integrity even when pushed heavily, avoiding the unnatural saturation and artifacting observed in Photoshop. For instance, Lightroom's luminance adjustments retain the true saturation of colors, offering precise control to brighten or darken specific areas without causing unintended color shifts. According to Kloskowski, Lightroom's approach suits photography better because the app itself was designed specifically for photo editing, unlike Photoshop, which serves a broader audience including graphic designers and illustrators.
In a second demonstration featuring wildlife photography, the differences become even clearer. Photoshop’s Adjust Colors struggles even more noticeably, creating pronounced edges and strange artifacts around details such as the bird's feathers. Lightroom, in contrast, manages these color adjustments far more smoothly, preserving the photo’s quality and natural look. Kloskowski emphasizes that photographers—whose primary goal is often to maintain realism and subtlety—will likely find Photoshop’s tool less beneficial compared to Lightroom’s dedicated color editing capabilities.
The video also covers Adobe's intent behind these overlapping tools. Photoshop, originally made for broad creative purposes beyond photography, includes these tools to serve graphic designers who might not regularly use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. Therefore, Adobe’s adjustments are not necessarily targeted at photographers, even though photographers frequently use Photoshop.
Beyond just pointing out problems, Kloskowski stresses that tools should ultimately serve your creative goals, urging that if Adjust Colors works for you despite its quirks, continue using it. He prioritizes the outcome over the method, advocating flexibility and personal preference above strict adherence to any single workflow or software recommendation. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Kloskowski.
This is great to show the differences with color adjustments between PS and Lrc, a must see before playing with colors in an image! Myself not much on using PS for edits but there are many photographers who use PS due to editing just certain parts of an image and then putting all together vs Lrc that has grown to having masking of sections and then also playing with sections of an image.