Lightbox vs Photoshop

Community
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What are your thoughts about Lightbox vs Photoshop when it comes to preparing photos for a website?

From what others have told me, Lightbox is great if you have a bunch of photos that need resized or need some mass change applied to all of them.

I haven’t used Photoshop in over 20 years, but back in the day it was supposed to be superior to anything else as far as optimizing photos for the web so that they looked the best without taking up a lot of space.

Personally, I am an open-source person, but in this one instance I am think of breaking down and buying some software to help me as I prepare to go live with my website.

Would appreciate everyone’s thoughts on this!

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Hi, personally I would choose photoshop, it’s because I know this software quite well, but If you’re wondering whether Photoshop or Lightroom is the right application for you please go to this page

it should help you decide

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Photoshop is subscription only now £9.98/month in the UK and comes with Lightroom and Bridge as well as another couple of “free” programs.

Darktable is getting quite popular and it is free; it has a Windows version now. I tried it but could not get the hang of it so gave up.

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@Rubble,

So you cannot outright buy Lightbox or Photoshop?

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Another popular open source option is GIMP.

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Lightbox or Photoshop Lightroom?

No subscription only unless you can find an old version somewhere.

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I was asking if you can buy Lightbox outright. Also if you can buy Photoshop outright?

Do you have any experience with Lightbox?

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Any actual users of Lightbox here?

From what a reliable sorce at my local camera shop told me, Lightbox would be a better place to start and then if I need to do serious photo-manipulation, then Photoshop comes into play.

I guess I am stuck on thinking I need Photoshop because long ago that was the only way to truly optimize your photos for the web. Maybe Lightbox or other more basic apps can do that now too?

And as far as Gimp, @Gandalf, I have played around with it, but the documentation support still sucks - as with most open-source projects.

I figure one benefit of ponying up and going with Adobe is that at least I will have a wealth of well-written books and guides available, which probably makes sense if I am running a business and e-commerce site where I need quality photos.

Once concern I have is that I want something that is not only easy to learn, but will scale.

Using something that I can learn in an hour but that I will outgrow in 3 months isn’t good. And finding something that will scale but that will take me all of 2020 to learn is problematic as well!