I was reading a thread about dodging and burning on Yahoo! flickr this morning:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157603694359812/

A comment caught my attention. "I also do it in Lightroom now. I could actually live without Photoshop now, and I only use it for one in 50 photos."

This is the flip side of the discussion that Scott Kelby and Matt Klowkowski had a couple of weeks ago. They were talking abut ACR 5 and whether Lightroom was necessary.

http://www.thelightsright.com/node/70

I agree completely with Scott and Matt. (Yes, I do tend to agree with them, but it's because they're so smart. I'm not just being a toady.) I have Lightroom. I have Photoshop. I use both.

The performance of LR 2 was a disappointment. Especially when you worked with the selective brush. The recent update to LR 2.1 fixed the performance issue.

You can quickly process RAW images in LR and make basic adjustments to color and tone. That's what I use LR for. Then I load the photos into PS as Smart Objects. That gives me the ability to go back and change the settings, just like I could with adjustment layers for Levels or Curves, etc.

You can do basic dodging and burning in LR, just as the flickr thread notes. You can use the Photoshop Dodge tool and Burn tool, too. They've improved a lot in CS4, too. I still don't use them. I prefer to fill an Overlay layer with midtone gray and brush my dodge & burn adjustments into that. If I need more intense dodge and burn, I'll use a pair of Curves adjustment layers.

There are things I can do in Photoshop that cannot be done in LR. I can easily adjust DOF with the Lens Blur filter, for example. I use blurs a lot in Photoshop. I learned from Scott Kelby a long time ago that one way of increasing apparent sharpness for some features is to apply a little blur to other features.

What about ACR? Can't you get the same RAW processing as you get with LR? With the release of ACR 5, LR and ACR are on par with respect to RAW processing. Same engine. But LR is more than just a dressed up version of ACR. I'm a digital photographer, not a graphic artist.  I find the user interface in LR to be a lot more intuitive than Adobe Bridge.

Noise reduction is aother area where you have more flexibility in Photoshop. This comes from the plug-in, scripting, and action capabilities in Photoshop that do not exist in LR. Oh, LR does have a limited plug-in capacity. It's a scripting interface masquerading as a plug-in capacity. It has limited impact; primarily it is used to add some additional processing to an image before it is exported. Stuff like adding metadata elements for GPS coordinates, prepping photos for Web galleries, etc.

Noise reduction in Lightroom is a weak point. It works well only when noise is not a significant problem. IOW, the noise has to be a minor distraction. Throw a photo at it taken at ISO 1600 from a Canon or Nikon DSLR and you will almost certainly be disappointed at the result from LR compared to what you can get with something like Neat Image, Noise Ninja, or Noiseware in Photoshop.

LR does allow users to save and share presets. Presets are not a substitute for scripts and actions in Photoshop. I was going to port some of the TLR action sets from PS to LR. The problem is that most of my actions use features that are not available in LR. I'll give you an example. I wanted to port over the TLR Faux Infrared actions into LR presets. There are some faux infrared presets for Lightroom already. They do a good job of translating the tones. But the photos are too sharp and too noise-free to be credible faux infrared images. Infrared film images have soft focus and more than a little luminosity noise. That's easy to do in Photoshop. The TLR actions use the Add Noise filter and apply Gaussian Blur. LR has a brush to reduce sharpening, but that is a very pale comparison to even a 1 pixel Gaussian Blur in Photoshop.

Back to my main point . . .

I have LR. I have PS. I use both. I us LR more now than I did with LR 1. Neither is a replacement for the other. Just as Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have overlap, so do Photoshop and Lightroom.

LR-only users will not like this statement, but if I had to choose only one, it would be Photoshop. I can live with Bridge. There are features in PS, really important features for even basic retouching, that I could not live without.

Fortunately, for me, that's a phony choice. I choose both.

I've written enough. Feel free to add your own comments.

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