Element or Lightroom?

You could still try GIMP if Lightroom is lacking in image editing. (Like that chap in the Flickr link)

I use the latter but find I end up repeating processing workflows all the time which I believe Lightroom would help me with.
 
Most of the Black Friday stuff mentioned is more or less right - it's evolved into a huge shopping extravaganza where retailers offer massive discounts. It's less about stock clearance (the volume of shoppers and their expectations means the deals are generally brought in specifically for the BF deals) and more about kick-starting Christmas shopping. A lot of Americans don't do Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving.

Amazon.co.uk brought this all over to the UK last year for the first time (and within a day or two all the other electronics retailers had copied us!) with a week long series of "lightning deals" where customers were given massive discounts on thousands of units of hundreds of products for a limited time, typically an hour at a time... and they still sold out in minutes/seconds!

Now, can anyone guess where I work?! :-)
 
Ben: said:
So basically....too long for me to wait.
Lightroom it is.
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Pretty much... Although there are frequent promotions on all of the Adobe products so keep an eye out on site, most recently I think there was something like a 40% discount if you bought both PS and LR but I've got a feeling that the offer was only promoted via the Amazon.co.uk Twitter account.
 
Didn't read the other posts but if you have CS3 then I would recon elements is a downgrade!

Get Lightroom and use it with CS3. CS5 does not add that much and in fact very little to what I alread used before!
 
thorton said:
not sure what the others have said but my 2 cents is that lightroom is 100% worth it, even on top of photoshop.

photoshop and lightroom are made for different things - lightroom being much more specific to photo editing and batch processing - if i had to keep one if would obviously be photoshop but thats because i dont just do photography, i do a whole host of designing - but if i had to choose one for photography? lightroom all the way, photoshop takes far too long to batch process photographs.
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Dont think I could do without LR or PhotoShop, if you only do a small number of shots PhotoShop would be better imo.

Lightroom does a lot of my heavy lifting, batch process, keyword my files, manage libraries of images etc. PhotoShop does the final tweaks, skin retouching if needed, cloning things out. Things that lightroom doesn't do so well.

If you don't shoot a lot of images and don't mind spending a bit more time then PhotoShop alone will do the job.
 
If you use the clone and healing brush a lot then I would say Elements is the better option. The latest version seems to have a version of the 'content aware' healing option, judging by the video here. (click on the 'Instantly unclutter or repair photos' link)

With Elements you have a cut down version of the Adobe Camera Raw plugin.(I think) Lightroom is, for the most part, Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw combined. I was looking for videos on Adobe Camera Raw a few weeks ago, and the chap in one of the videos said that ACR was a global image editor and that Photoshop was a details editor. I'd never thought of it like that, but I think he was right. Now he was talking about ACR and CS5, and there would not be the control that would be available with ACR and CS5 as that of the version of ACR in Elements and Elements itself, but the same idea applies imho.

Of course if you could transfer your CS3 to the new computer, Lightroom may be a better option, but the better content aware healing of Elements 9 looks a lot more advanced than what CS3 had if I remember correctly. ;)

I've used Lightroom, but prefer the Bridge and ACR combination, just to let you know what my bias is. ;) The last version of Elements I used was 5 or 6, so I'm not sure how much closer that it has evolved to the full CS* features.:shrug:
 
Elements is a cut down version of Photoshop - which - in spite of it's name was never designed for editing pictures! It is a graphics programme which was around a long time before digital photography - I had VERSION 3 in the mid eighties! Lightroom was designed for digital pictures and is light years ahead of PS for most digital photo tasks.
 
awp said:
Elements is a cut down version of Photoshop - which - in spite of it's name was never designed for editing pictures! It is a graphics programme which was around a long time before digital photography - I had VERSION 3 in the mid eighties! Lightroom was designed for digital pictures and is light years ahead of PS for most digital photo tasks.
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Sorry, I don't agree. :nono:

I'm not sure what Photoshop was designed for, but it is the ultimate photo editing program. Lightroom is, as I said earlier, basically Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw combined and makes mainly global changes to the image. Photoshop/Elements allow for precise adjustments, and global adjustments. You also get the Camera Raw plugin in too.

Obviously it may not be for everyone, but then neither is Lightroom. :shrug: It depends on the type of editing you want to do to an image, Lightroom is powerful, but limited, Photoshop with the ACR plugin can do it all imho. And Elements and ACR too to a lesser degree, but still more versatile than just Lightroom alone.
 
All the photos in my portfolio were edited in Lightroom only. I love it. It's intuitive, powerful and designed strictly for photographers.

Adjustment brush allows you to paint with exposure, brightness, contrast... You can clone and heal, crop, minimise digital noise, apply vignette, fix distortion, do selective colour (ugh...), use Viveza and OneOne plugins, use presets, use printing templates, apply watermarks...

and many more.
 
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redhed17 said:
Sorry, I don't agree. :nono:

I'm not sure what Photoshop was designed for, but it is the ultimate photo editing program. Lightroom is, as I said earlier, basically Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw combined and makes mainly global changes to the image. Photoshop/Elements allow for precise adjustments, and global adjustments. You also get the Camera Raw plugin in too.

Obviously it may not be for everyone, but then neither is Lightroom. :shrug: It depends on the type of editing you want to do to an image, Lightroom is powerful, but limited, Photoshop with the ACR plugin can do it all imho. And Elements and ACR too to a lesser degree, but still more versatile than just Lightroom alone.
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I can do 95% of my picture editing in LR - maybe more - if you NEED Photoshop all the time - maybe you need to look at your camera technique?
 
awp said:
I can do 95% of my picture editing in LR - maybe more - if you NEED Photoshop all the time - maybe you need to look at your camera technique?
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I do about the same amount of post processing with Camera Raw, so I don't 'NEED' Photoshop, but I 'want' it, just in case ACR can't do something I want to do. Also, I 'want' Photoshop for more experimental things every so often.

Now I haven't used Elements since version 5/6, so I'm not sure what is missing from Elements 9 compared to CS5. :shrug:

The OP asked for opinions and I've just been putting across what I use, and what I would choose. :shrug:
 
awp said:
I can do 95% of my picture editing in LR - maybe more - if you NEED Photoshop all the time - maybe you need to look at your camera technique?
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LR won't do a good or quick enough job of cloning out exit signs etc. You have a camera technique that makes them disappear in camera?
 
lensflair said:
LR won't do a good or quick enough job of cloning out exit signs etc. You have a camera technique that makes them disappear in camera?
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Composition?


Sorry, couldn't resist...

Sent from a touchscreen thing I hit randomly with a club, using TP Forums. As if you care.
 
flossie said:
Composition?

Sorry, couldn't resist...

Sent from a touchscreen thing I hit randomly with a club, using TP Forums. As if you care.
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Ha....ha

Yeah but its not always an option, shoot a few weddings and then tell me you can ALWAYS frame the shot to avoid those bloody signs.
 
Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS5 have the same Bridge and ACR modules. Which is pretty much what Lightroom is based on, but Lightroom takes these further, for batch actions etc.

Lightroom was designed from the ground up for photographers, Photoshop is an all round digital image editing programme, and is a very good all round bit of kit, but I find I only really use it for really complicated cloning, anything else I just do in Lightroom, to be honest most of the time I use Photoshop it is for graphic design projects rather than photo processing.
 
Go with elements! the content aware is worth the money on its own, your cloning will be so much better and easier. + elements is cheaper, however if you shoot raw lightroom is meant to even top photoshop so there is a good argument for choosing that one hmmm :shrug: its a hard decision.
Jack
 
Craikeybaby said:
Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS5 have the same Bridge and ACR modules. Which is pretty much what Lightroom is based on, but Lightroom takes these further, for batch actions etc.
/QUOTE]

I thought that the Elements version of ACR may not be exactly the same as the CS5 version. :shrug: Great if it is. :thumbs:

You can batch edit (not sure what you mean by batch actions :shrug:) in Bridge and ACR.

I read somewhere that Lightroom is starting to move away from the photo management and editing aspect core and into other areas such a showcasing/printing and online publishing.
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I think the best thing about lightroom is that all your edits are non destructive (directly on your raws) so you dont fill up you hd with endless copies of the same file. Its not until you export that you actually create a new copy of the image.
 
ST8 said:
I think the best thing about lightroom is that all your edits are non destructive (directly on your raws) so you dont fill up you hd with endless copies of the same file. Its not until you export that you actually create a new copy of the image.
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ACR in photoshop does the same thing, you can edit the raw and save the changes without opening the image proper.
 
redhed17 said:
Craikeybaby said:
Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS5 have the same Bridge and ACR modules. Which is pretty much what Lightroom is based on, but Lightroom takes these further, for batch actions etc.
/QUOTE]

I thought that the Elements version of ACR may not be exactly the same as the CS5 version. :shrug: Great if it is. :thumbs:

You can batch edit (not sure what you mean by batch actions :shrug:) in Bridge and ACR.

I read somewhere that Lightroom is starting to move away from the photo management and editing aspect core and into other areas such a showcasing/printing and online publishing.
Click to expand...

Elements has less features in ACR.
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