Newb Software Question

[Positron]

I have both Lightroom and Photoshop, and I use Lightroom for about 98% of my editing, sending an image to Photoshop only if I need to do exposure blending, pixel-level editing or certain effects like Gaussian Blur. For distortion correction, exposure tweaks, curves, color, cropping, [cloning, which I never do], and pretty much everything else, Lightroom gives the same results a whole lot faster. What it comes down to is that Lightroom has pretty much all the tools needed for photos without any of the other features that Photoshop needs to include for other types of users. The lens profile distortion and vignetting corrections alone are a good enough reason for me to use Lightroom as the first step in my workflow.

Right now the Lightroom 4 Beta is free and I highly recommend giving it a try while that's still the case!

P.S. Lightroom is a standalone application with decent, but not excellent, hooks into Photoshop. For example, you can select a group of images in Lightroom and have it open them as layers in a new Photoshop file, or use Photoshop's HDR tool to merge them. But for the most part, they work independently.