| Lightroom does two things:
First, it allows you to organizing your photos using metadata and keywords. This is a much more powerful way of managing your photos than using the native file system on your Mac or PC. Keyword tagging in particular adds extra dimensions to your ability to manage projects of any size.
Second, it is a dedicated tool for processing raw files. You can rip through a day's shooting ten times faster with Lightroom than you can with Photoshop. The reasons are a) Lightroom does not need to convert the raw files to another format, b) it allows you to apply adjustments to large numbers of photos simultaneously, and c) it has tools for rapid triage and comparison of photos to rate photos and delete the unacceptable ones.
That said, Lightroom does not do everything Photoshop does. If you need to use complex masking in adjusting your photos, or HDR then Lightroom's tools will fall short. However, you can round-trip between Lightroom and Photoshop, using them in tandem.
I've been using Lightroom for about a year, and I couldn't go back to using Photoshop alone for handling large numbers of raw files. |