If you have Bridge and Photoshop CS3, why would you want Lightroom?
Lightroom is a complete workflow solution. You can do everything from assign metadata on import to process your photos to manage your printing. Lightroom does everything Bridge does, but easier. Lightroom does a lot of things bridge does not:
1. manage your printing. So if you have one image you want to print 4×6 on your small printer and then print it 12×16 on your big printer, that becomes much easier. Each printing setup is saved as an automatic preset
2. manage your file exports: if you save images at one size for your blog, another size for Flickr, and save full-size to iStockphoto, those are all saved as automatic presets.
3. Allows you to save multiple “virtual copies” of the same file with very little file size increase. So I can save three or ten versions of a single file without having to save the file ten times
4. Lightroom has more develop options than Photoshop or Bridge, and all of them are easier and more intuitive to use. You can likewise save develop presets to you can “save” different processing options and “try” them instantly.
In short, Lightroom is not essential but it is really easy, useful, and even fun. If you process a lot of images, it’s one of those products which you can’t imagine why you would need it, but once you use it you find that you don’t want to live without it.
