Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The fundamental difference between LR and a pixel editing program is that, strange though it sounds, LR doesn't in fact edit your picture. What is does is allow you to apply a sequence of editing operations, but it stores the list of operations, rather than their results. You can go backwards and forwards through the list of edits, and apply the editing operations you've done on one picture to a whole series of others. This makes it great for "batch processing" a whole run of images at a time. The only time the picture actually gets "edited" is when you export it from LR as a JPEG, but even then it's creating a copy; the original is untouched.
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Yes, that is called "non-destructive photo editing". Enthusiasts and professions are likely going to want this option. Others might want it too, of course. Apps that use non-destructive photo editing create a text file containing the edit information. So for example, if I edited a RAW file named
MyRAWPhoto.arw, the app would create an associated text file named something similar to
MyRAWPhoto.xmp which contains the information for all of the non-destructive edits. LR places this info in a database file, whereas PS creates an XMP file. Either way, the result is the same. when I open MyRAWPhoto.arw in LR or PS or whatever other app that can do non-destructive edits, it will look for the associated file like MyRAWPhoto.xmp and use it to recreate the edits. In non-destructive editing, the actual RAW file is never edited, only the associated file is updated with the edit information.