Best Photoshop

friesianfan69

friesianfan69

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Donna
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What is the best Photoshop to use?
That is not to hard to use?
I use Lightroom 3 at present.
 
Elements 9 is a basic editor, plenty of tutorials from Adobe or YouTube or splash out like I did on CS 5

Les :thumbs:
 
I think its as easy as you want to make it- I bought a book by Scott Kelby and the idiots guide to CS5, Im learning more everyday to be honest, but its an enjoyable learning curve as CS5 does so much and then some :lol:

Les :D

Ps Adobe have numerous tutorials on CS5 all free and on the Adobe web site

have a look here- http://www.adobe.com/support/photoshop/gettingstarted/
 
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What doesnt LR3 do that you want it too?

I havent used CS5 since buying lightroom 2 years ago.
 
CS5 is great to use,theres plenty of online tutorials,every day is a learning curve..
 
Lez325 said:
I think its as easy as you want to make it
Click to expand...

I totally agree with this. Photoshop is a pretty deep, complex program but learning the basics is actually very straightforward, and the rest you'll learn as you go along. Fundamentally, Photoshop, from a photographer's perspective, hasn't really changed much in the last decade, apart from the addition of a few new significant tools and some refining of older ones.
 
TCR4x4 said:
What doesnt LR3 do that you want it too?

I havent used CS5 since buying lightroom 2 years ago.
Click to expand...

For me I do 99% of editing in Lightroom, but jump to Elements when I need to use layers.

Phil
 
Lightroom you can't shade behind an object , like to do a black background etc!
Well I don't think you can, I'm still learning
 
friesianfan69 said:
Lightroom you can't shade behind an object , like to do a black background etc!
Well I don't think you can, I'm still learning
Click to expand...

You can darken a background in LR - often all the way to black using an exposure adjustment brush. You can't paint as such, but this often isn't needed.

Phil
 
While we're on the subject....

I'm still using Photoshop 5. Not CS5, 5.0 from 1998. I've looked into upgrading in the past, but I've gotten a bit too comfortable with good old trusty 5.

It's gotten to the point though where modifying tutorials to compensate for lacking features ("liquify"? What's that?) is becoming a ballache.

With this in mind, and with ten years of familiarity to fight against, am I likely to be satisfied with Lightroom or Elements, or should I sell a kidney and go all out for CS6?



(I wish I hadn't looked up how old 5.0 was now :( )
 
Try the free 30 day trail of CS6 - but be prepared for a bit of future shock! You can get Elements for trail as well, and that is likely to do all you need for day-to-day stuff. I'd seriously advise you to get a good book (Scott Kelby, for instance), or do a course if you can find one.
 
Removed. Sorry. That's not an official product, tis a hooky one ;)
 
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I use CS6 as a graphic designer but I'm also a photographer. I haven't used it for any photography yet but it does seem to have some cool new features over CS5 such as the blurs...whether they are worth all that money though, is debatable!
 
Lightroom and Photoshop are 2 very different things.

Lightroom is RAW processing and catalogue (and more now with LR4). You can make basic adjustments to particular set of parameters, such as WB, exposure, colours, levels, toning, sharpening, noise reduction, etc. You can make local adjustments as well now, but IMO, nowhere as advanced as Photoshop when it comes to pixel based adjustment.

Photoshop is purely a single image manipulation software (although you can get it with Bridge, which does a lot of what Lightroom does, to be fair). It's a lot more complex, but as a photographer, you will probably need only about 15% of its features. Very helpful when you know what to do. It's a very steep learning curve, and not easy on your wallet neither.

What you need will depend on how much photo editing you see you will be doing. If it's basic stuff like correcting exposure, removing a few dust spots, correcting red eye, playing with a bit of colour, convert to black and white, then Lightroom will do the job perfectly well. If you want to start going into finer details, or multi layer editing, then really Photoshop is the way to go. I have never used Elements, so cannot even comment.

However, if you decide to go down the Photoshop route, don't even bother trying CS6 on trial if you don't even know the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop. It will go straight over your head. Start to crawl before trying to compete for Team GB :) For a beginner Photoshopper, I would say Photoshop 7 is powerful enough to learn. You can pick them up for peanuts on ebay (there's one going for £30 now). Fundamentally, not much as changed, although each release does get better and better, with added features. But it's like saying your first car must be the latest S class Merc, when all you need is a E reg Fiesta :)

Enjoy. It's amazingly useful and fun once you grasp the concept!
 
Problem for me with Photoshop (although it is a great program and I do use it), is that when Adobe bring out a new version (like the current CS6), they stop any development on the Camera Raw plug ins for the old versions, so if you get a newer camera, you are sort of forced to upgrade to the next version (which I know you are with many programs) if you want to use the full RAW functionality (I know you can convert to DNG but it's not the same), but with Photoshop being so expensive to buy in the first place (circa £550ish), it's still £200 to upgrade to the next version (or much more if you don't own the exact preceeding version).

At least with Lightroom, the upgrade from 2-3 and 3-4 was much less painful (Lightroom 3 to 4 for instance was only £59.60 - much more mangeable). I suppose a workaround is to keep upgrading LR (for a small amount of money), do the RAW conversions in there, then take it across to any version of PS you may have (you just don't get some of the later added features).

I do agree though, PS is a vast program and I only use maybe 30% of it's capabilities, and certainly does do things that Lightroom can't and can be great fun. I just find for my purposes, LR to be much more intuative and allows you to concentrate on the image processing rather than delving into menus or learning a vast number of shortcuts.

Just my opinion of course.
 
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Although I've never used it myself, I've heard GIMP is a pretty good piece of software and competely free!
 
I got CS3 for peanuts and Scott Kelbys book on CS3 off of here for cost of postage and can find all I want and more.
 
Russ77 said:
Although I've never used it myself, I've heard GIMP is a pretty good piece of software and competely free!
Click to expand...
I've tinkered. It is indeed pretty good (I'd say it's very good, even better when you consider it's free), but I'm not as keen on the layout, otherwise I'd use it more instead of going back to my vintage Photoshop.
 
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