Originally posted by Adam Adobe has killed off this product line. Below is the last standalone version of LR, which includes all camera/lens updates through December, 2017, but none thereafter:
But it's still also available directly from Adobe for now. Permanent license.
Lightroom organises your photo collection as well as performing non-destructive edits: exposure, contrast, brightness, tweaking highlights/midtones/shadows are a breeze in Lightroom. It also stitches panoramas and has tons of actions available for 1-click preset processing.
Photoshop (I still use CS4 with Bridge and Camera Raw 5.2) is
the photo editor par excellence and can do everything Lightroom does in photo editing plus immense amounts more. Whether you use it destructively (no going back) or non-destructively is up to your workflow, but if you want to focus stack, play with luminosity masks, selectively blend bracketed exposures, combine different images into a composite one, selectively remove or add details or any amount of other creative work, you'll need a proper photo editor and Photoshop is the industry standard for good reason. It also takes quite some time to learn properly – I did say it does
immense amounts more than Lightroom.
The Adobe Tax for photographers isn't too onerous, but I quite understand why you would want to pay for a permanent license and be done with it. I still use Photoshop CS4 etc. because it reads the .DNG images from my K-7 without issues.