- Yes, most people these days pay an annual subscription for Lightroom & Photoshop. Every once in a while Adobe has a sale where you can get the LR + PS bundle for $10 per month. However, if you’d rather buy Lightroom outright, you can do that too! B&H has it for $142.
- Lightroom is primarily made for editing RAW files, you’re correct. However, it is quite capable of editing JPG files as well, you’re just a little bit limited because of the nature of JPG files.
As you may know, the reason that most of us photographers shoot RAW, is so that we can control the processing that needs to be done to the image. A RAW image has minimal to no post-processing, so that gives us full control over any editing that we may want to do. A JPG file on the other hand has had a lot of processing done to it, including but not limited to:
- Sharpening
- Noise Reduction
- Contrast curve
- White Balance
- Plus any special dynamic-range stuff like Nikon’s
"D-Lighting"or Canon’s"Highlight Tone Priority"
All of these edits are “baked” into the picture, you can’t undo them. So if you’re not happy with how your camera sharpened the JPG, you can add more sharpening, but you can’t undo what the camera did. Same with Noise Reduction, curves, and the dynamic-range stuff. White balance can be edited somewhat, (as long as it’s not a very drastic change) but you’ll get better results with RAW for sure.
Another thing with JPG files is that they are compressed 8-bit files compared to 12 or 14-bits for RAW. This is not super important unless you edit your JPG files. If you want to edit your JPG though, you will get more noise and banding (especially in large areas of the same color, like the blue sky) because of the lower bit depth.