Photoshop is the most powerful photo manipulation software ever made; nearly every designer and photographer relies on Adobe's design software for some aspect of their work. Today, however, I'm going to make the case for choosing Lightroom over Photoshop. Here's why to pick Lightroom for your photos.

1. Comprehensive Interface

Lightroom has a comprehensive interface where things aren't hidden (yet manages not to feel crowded). If you take a look at Lightroom's home screen, you'll find that all your photos, adjustments and options are right in front of you rather than being hidden in complex menu entries.

2. Built-in Photo Organizer and Powerful Catalogue Features

Lightroom is also a photo organizer. In Photoshop, you can indeed open multiple files and manipulate or edit them simultaneously, and work with collections in Bridge, but it doesn't have a organizer built-in. Lightroom, on the other hand, is a full-featured photo organizer that enables you to view and manage all the images on your computer.

3. Dedicated Develop Center

Lightroom has a dedicated Develop module to make your photos look great. It's as useful as an analog darkroom, but far less fiddly.

4. Smooth and Effecient Workflows

Knowing how a photograph looks before and after a particular effect is applied is an important part of finding your signature look. In Photoshop, there is no dedicated before and after shortcut. Lightroom makes this side-by-side comparison easy. Likewise, working with large batches of images is a breeze compared to Photoshop.

5. Non-Destructive Editing

Everything you do in Lightroom is done virtually. Every enhancement, every brush stroke you make—every adjustment is reversable. Some people relate this to the layers feature of Photoshop, but Lightroom's metadata is in some ways much more powerful.

Suppose you enhanced one of your images in Photoshop. Now, in order to reverse the effects, you can just Undo it. But: only while Photoshop is running. The moment you exit the program with/without saving your work, Photoshop forgets what all was there.

Lightroom doesn't have the same problem. It doesn't matter if you exit Lightroom or even shut your computer down, Lightroom remembers everything, and you can reverse it at any point of time. All your originals remain intact and you can export your edited photographs from Lightroom whenever you feel like.

At the end of the day, Photoshop is a perfectly good tool for all your photography needs. It includes (almost) every feature found in Lightroom, and is immensely powerful. But, if you're looking for something that's more specific to your needs as a photographer, and makes the whole post-processing workflow simpler and more appealing, Lightroom is absolutely worth checking out.