So I open a RAW photo to edit in Photoshop, it opens the Camera RAW editor to select exposures and other meters. Once those are selected, I can open the image or open it as smart object.
My question is, when I add adjustment layers to make more changes, would the image still contain the same amount of data as RAW file or it would have been converted to a JPG or something similar that Photoshop reads with the settings I chose from the Camera RAW?
Answer
Photoshop is a general purpose raster image editor, and as you state it requires an intermediate step in order to open a RAW file (which is not, as such, an RGB raster image format).
Once Photoshop has opened the image and edited it, there are a number of file formats that you can use to save the image, some of which are capable of keeping the image as 16-bit and maintaining Photoshop layers, etc., but -- as far as I understand -- there isn't a way to deconstruct a Photoshop edited image back to a RAW file that has the same type of information stored the same way as a regular RAW file.
The difference between Photoshop and Lightroom (and one of the reasons Lightroom exists as a separate product), is that edits aren't applied as pixels to a raster image, but are saved as instructions for Lightroom on how to display the RAW file. With this non-destructive editing, the original information is preserved and edits can be tweaked or removed in the future.
(My background -- I've used Photoshop since version 2.5, but I've only recently purchased Lightroom)
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