lightroom

inyourface

inyourface

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Hi guys

I have some money ive been saving and was wandering what editing software to get.
looking around on the net and lightroom 5 keeps being mentioned and its a reasonable price.

so my question, is it worth me getting lightroom 5 and will it benefit someone so new to photography

thanks all
 
I am new and use LR, it does everything I need to do.

If you do decide to buy have a look at adobe as it is 30% off until the 9th.
 
It depends a lot on just what you want it for and what your going to do with it. LR5 is an excellent program and includes a catalogue so sort and record your pictures. It will do most of the editing you require including RAW conversion. If you want to do photo manipulation, then you will need layers and a few more facilities, in that case take a look at Adobe Elements, an equally good program but with different facilities. Check out their prices on Amazon.
 
Personally I would get PSE (which ever is the current version) as this opens up layers to you,which you may not need initially but it's nice to have!(y)
You could download the free 30 day trials of them both and see which you prefer(lightroom and PSE)!:)
 
As Cotty has said, give them both a try.
Since getting Lightroom I hardly use elements, the way I see it is Lightroom can enhance what you take while Photoshop can make it something totally different.
 
Download the free trial of Lightroom. I'll be amazed if you not hooked by the end of it.
Wonderful piece of software for the photographer.
 
Lightroom is primarily a raw developer program with an image cataloguing system built in.
If you shoot raw then LR is capable of returning great results, although you can use it with jpg images.
It also supports plug-ins, which are available from companies like NIK, OnOne (PerfectPhoto Suite) and Topaz labs.
With the addition of plug-ins you can do most things that you can achieve with Photoshop, including layers.
Lightroom does require a bit of learning, but if you are new to photography it's something you can grow with.
 
I have Lightroom 5 and it's brilliant I also have adobe master collection cs3 and the latest adobe cloud stuff on a payment plan so I think it's a very powerful set off photography editing software.
 
well most of my pictures will be of my wonderful children, seems a shame to watch them grow and not get nice pics to look back on.

having said that i really fancy having a go at star trails and i think i will probably spend alot of time on these type of shots, being a lover of the stars

just downloading the free trial so hopefully that may help me decide

thanks for all the replies

mat
 
Star trails is something different...for that you need starstax or similar
 
Hi all, I downloaded Lightroom 5 trial but I cant use it as it says I need win 7 which I dont have and whats more, I cant delete it for now as I guess its the trial version. :(
 
Graham said:
Hi all, I downloaded Lightroom 5 trial but I cant use it as it says I need win 7 which I dont have and whats more, I cant delete it for now as I guess its the trial version. :(
Click to expand...


what windows are you using Graham?
 
on CreativeLive.com for the next 3 days you can watch & learn how to use it with Lesa Snider. This will not cost anything.
 
i thought vista was 7 lol


can i ask.
what does elements 12 do that light room 5 deosnt do or vise versa

mat
 
inyourface said:
i thought vista was 7 lol


can i ask.
what does elements 12 do that light room 5 deosnt do or vise versa

mat
Click to expand...

Layers is the main thing that PSE can do that Lightroom can't.
I also find cloning/spot removal easier in PSE than Lightroom.
My workflow is RAW into Lightroom,then if necessary into PSE for any final tweaks and output sharpening!
Others may differ!
 
cotty332000 said:
Layers is the main thing that PSE can do that Lightroom can't.
I also find cloning/spot removal easier in PSE than Lightroom.
My workflow is RAW into Lightroom,then if necessary into PSE for any final tweaks and output sharpening!
Others may differ!
Click to expand...

I use the same process.

Just upgraded from LR4 to LR5, whilst not a massive step up, the improved clone/heal tool, radial filter and auto straighten tools are great :)

Add to that it's very easy to tweek an image in PSE11 if required, IMO it's a decent set up for under £200!
 
can i open raw in elements?

i cant really justify buying both just yet until i know im going to stick to photography.
 
inyourface said:
i thought vista was 7 lol
Dont get me wrong but vista was out in about 2007/08 ish and win 7 several yrs after that so no I dont think vista is win 7 but win 7 maybe was built on vistas platform. So not the same. But im no expert.

can i ask.
what does elements 12 do that light room 5 deosnt do or vise versa

mat
Click to expand...
inyourface said:
i thought vista was 7 lol


can i ask.
what does elements 12 do that light room 5 deosnt do or vise versa

mat
Click to expand...

mber: 68446"]i thought vista was 7 lol


can i ask.
what does elements 12 do that light room 5 deosnt do or vise versa

mat[/quote]
Dont get me wrong but vista was out I
 
Yes, Elements has a RAW converter and it has a catalogue for your pictures too. Without knowing exactly what your going to do, perhaps Elements is the more versatile of the two.
Now that I have upgraded to LR5 from LR4, I am using Photoshop CS6 (similar to Elements) less and less, its only when I am manipulating images that I go outside Lightroom now. If you continue with your hobby and want to upgrade to Lightroom at a later date, LR will import your Elements catalogue seamlessly so its easy to upgrade and use the two side by side.
 
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I use Lightroom also, very versatile and there always improving elements of it as time goes on, in partuclar the lens profiles are updated, which is handy if you've bought a new one recently.
 
Graham said:
mber: 68446"]i thought vista was 7 lol


can i ask.
what does elements 12 do that light room 5 deosnt do or vise versa

mat
Click to expand...
Dont get me wrong but vista was out I[/quote]

sorry graham not sure what you mean ?
 
Scroll up
 
Trev4 said:
Yes, Elements has a RAW converter
Click to expand...

And that's probably the best that can be said about it. Elements hasd a raw converter, LightRoom has a raw editor and can do loads of things impossible in PSE.
 
well i thought i would post my question and get the answer :)

im just as confused as when i asked, but i can understand why though.

ive downloaded the free trials and been messing around with them but dont have a clue what im doing, i did manage to turn a picture of the wife a funny shade of green :troll: and she looked like she just crawled out of a swamp.
i said it was an improvement and im sure my black eye will get better shortly.

on a serious note i think i will download lightroom 5 for now and if i stick with photography i will download pse

thanks for all ythe advice


mat
 
Have a look on YouTube on various tutorials for both to give you an idea of what both can do.
 
My take on Lightroom (my reference being v3, which works on Windows XP) is that it's far less intuitive than full-blown Photoshop (any version). Its imaging functions are excellent as far as they go, but its cataloguing functions are hard to escape, & that's the non-intuitive bit. Depends on your brain structure, I think. If I could live effectively without it, I would. But even at v3, it's a master processor of RAW file camera output. If you're just taking jpg's from the camera, and want to fiddle with them, forget it - and yet ...
 
ok here is another question im currently running elements 11 but just having a play with LR5 free trial. Would you say that im wasting my money if i got LR5 as i have elements or is it good to have the option of both. I suppose my only worry would be that if got LR5 elements would become obsolete. I know this is a bit by the by but iv got £100 of Amazon vouchers burning a hole in my pocket so it wouldn't be a loss of my hard earned cash.

oh and by the way i shoot in raw and i normally like to just edit a pic get it on flicr or on here, im not into making bloody calenders and photo albums which i know elements is very good a promoting.
 
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Personally I think Lightroom is far more intuitive than Photoshop. It has some great tools and does almost everything that a photographer will ever need. If anything it is becoming too overloaded with features!

Although LR doesn't have layers, I never used them in Photoshop so it's no great loss to me.
 
Bobby uk said:
Would you say that im wasting my money if i got LR5 as i have elements or is it good to have the option of both.
Click to expand...

No, LR5 defintely wouldn't be a waste of money if you shoot raw. Yes, PSE does have a version of Adobe Camera Raw for handling raw files. But it's a hugely cut-down version of ACR that lacks all of the really useful stuff found in LR. LR5 would make a great partnership with PSE11. You'll probably find that you end up using LR for almost everything you currently do in PSE.
 
You could always try and get used to the software which came with your camera as well. This will have at least a basic RAW conversion program. Personally I find the RAW conversion in DPP to be better for simple stuff than Photoshop, and I prefer to use the transfer function usually rather than open in photoshop.

Also consider, there is no rush. Keep taking the photos, keep them, don't delete them. You can get the software to 'improve' them later if needs be.
Sometimes I think there can be some good deals on the lightroom program which might be worth waiting for (others might be better able to comment).
 
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I feel that investing in LR5 would be to your advantage if only for the far superior RAW processing over PSE. The only thing that LR5 doesn't have out of the facilities that most photographers use is layers. Before I had Lightroom, I used Photoshop CS*, and Elements for cataloguing. Now that I have used Lightroom for a time, I rarely use CS6 unless I am manipulating an image using layers, and that's very rare, LR5 does everything I need on a day to day basis and is far more intuitive than the alternatives in my opinion. If for any reason I had to choose between the systems, it would be LR5 first, and Elements as a support program, even though I have bought CS6, I wouldn't buy it again now that I have got used to LR5, and ELements would do any other things that I occasionally might need.
 
Out of interest what camera do you have? I use Capture nx for my Nikon and I have CS3 extended but never use it for photos as Capture nx does what I need. However I am a newbie but find Capture nx a lot earlier to use and can do some really good stuff, it's just not great on batch stuff
 
I find Lightroom very effective for selecting which images to process from large sets (600 - 1,000+ from a several hours' session of close-ups out in the field). I found Faststone Image Viewer pretty good for this, but now I have got used to it I find Lightroom even better.

I find Lightroom very intuitive to use for a large part of my photo-editing. I find I can control the distribution and quality of light and colours in my images (at both the large-scale and the small scale) better in Lightroom than in any other editor I have used (which includes CS2 and Elements amongst others prior to that). I find Lightroom intuitive in that I can think "I want to change the image in such and such a way" and can often do so very directly, quickly and with a lot of control using the main sliders. In contrast I found other editors less direct and less intuitive (e.g. using Levels and Curves, gamma, defogging and other tools).

I don't use Lightroom for sharpening because I need to be able to see the effect of output sharpening at full size for screen based output as part of the interactive editing process, and Lightroom doesn't allow this. I don't use Lightroom much for cloning/healing because even though they have improved this in LR5 it is still much slower and awkward to use compared to CS2, and in difficult cases I simply can't get the results I need with Lightroom. There are some editing options for stretching and squashing that I use in CS2 that aren't available in Lightroom. I use a combination of Lightroom and (layers in) CS2 for noise control (my images are often noisy, sometimes very noisy).

I don't use Lightroom, or anything else, for cataloguing my images at the moment. But now I have started trying to identify the invertebrates I photograph that might change. If it does, I suspect it will be Lightroom I use for this.

I use some additional software for mutli-image techniques - Zerene stacker for image stacking (improved dof for close-ups), AutoPano Pro for panoramas and Photomatix Essentials for (realistic) HDR. I suspect a more up to date version of CS might do most or all of this. But Lightroom certainly doesn't.

So I do find Lightroom an excellent tool, but for my purposes it is one piece of kit amongst several in my software toolkit.
 
inyourface said:
Ihave a nikon d5200
Click to expand...
Capture NX2, really easy programme to use the healing brush could be better but still does a perfect job on small to medium blemishes / spots etc. You may of had a copy in the box? You should of had view nx which can be used together. The colour control points are great especially for tidying up backgrounds and precise tweaks.
 
I've been trying a variety of raw editors recently, including photodirector and lightroom 5. These 2 seem very close (and PD is relatively cheap) but they tend to produce quite different end results in my hands. LR seems capable of pulling out the most detail from a raw file, even finding information in areas appearing solid black, and at the same time produces excellent skin tones and textures without applying smoothing tools. DP tends to produce stronger, punchier images with a bit more excitement and slightly different handling of contrasts, but it's harder to reclaim shadow and highlight detail if your images are pushing dynamic range to the limit. PD has a few tools not explicitly present in LR (similar effects can probably be generated using the tools that are there, but you'd need to ask 'how do I do that' rather than being offered an 'Eye Blinger' tool) though whether they are worthwhile is another matter. I've a feeling clone/healing/spot removal is better in LR too, and with PD you have to save the modified image separately to retain the changes made in clone/healing.

Ultimately I'm probably going to end up using LR5 as my main editor once this trial has elapsed, because it's more capable of extracting exquisite tones.
 
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