Originally posted by 87Duckfan Can I just buy one of these?
You can only rent either of these programs, the same company, Adobe, publishes both Lightroom and Photoshop and Adobe only offers a subscription these days, not a permanent license to these programs. You can rent Lightroom separately from Photoshop or as part of a Photography package (which includes Photoshop, at least in some markets), and the monthly price depends on how much online storage comes with the package as well as whether or not you rent Lightroom by itself. Photoshop can rented by itself (without Lightroom, but with some minor apps like Adobe Fonts included) for more money than the Photography package (at least in some markets), or as part of Creative Cloud, which includes basically every piece of software Adobe currently makes available (for video production, developing websites, vector illustration, etc.) for more money than any of the other plans.
Confusing, right? It only gets worse, there is Lightroom and Lightroom Classic; Lightroom Classic stores your originals on your computer, Lightroom Classless stores your originals on the Internet. You don't have to be a serious photographer to have more than 1 Terabyte of original digital photos and uploading your originals to the Internet for Adobe to store them for you takes longer than storing them on your own computer and may require a more expensive Internet connection than you currently have (or want to have) to provide a satisfactory experience using the program.
What about Photoshop? There is some overlap between processing your digital photos with Photoshop or Lightroom, but the general process is very different. In Lightroom you work from a visual catalog of all your photos, easily making changes to one or many photos, but you can't "paint" on your photos like you can with Photoshop. Photoshop lets you create completely new images or combine any kind of graphic image with your digital photos, but making changes to more than one photo at a time requires batch processing and is not as intuitive as using Lightroom. For the ultimate in digital processing, you would use both Lightroom and Photoshop, starting with Lightroom and editing individual photos in Photoshop. However, you can do lots of editing just in Lightroom, especially if you just want to make changes to the overall image (like adjusting brightness, contrast and colour tones) or remove spots, red-eye, chromatic aberations; compensate for lens distortion, etc.