Hi, Thing is you already have a program that has layers amongst it's arsenal among other parts not available in Lightroom however and IMO today's Lightroom can do nearly everything a photo needs doing to it especially if you as you say GET IT RIGHT IN CAMERA. If it was me I would keep the P/S CS2 and run it along with Lightroom if that is possible and sure someone will give more info on that.
Download the trial of L/R and see how you get on, it's free to try and you don't have to buy!!!
Russ
I use CS2 and Lightroom. I used CS2 for several years before using Lightroom. I find Lightroom much easier to use - I can look at an image and think I want to change the look of it in a certain way, and very often I can use the sliders to achieve what I want, quickly and easily. I find it especially good for handling the distribution/quality/manipulation of light, clarity and colour, both globally across an image and locally within an image, which is a large part of my PP. For this I use the global sliders and also localised changes using the excellent radial filters and, less often, the adjustment brush. I find I can sometimes achieve results in Lightroom that I find more pleasing/credible than I was able to achieve in CS2 no matter how hard I tried.
Lightroom lets you make "virtual copies" of image so you can try different processing on separate versions of an image and compare the results.
I also find Lightroom's approach to cropping much better than anything else I have used.
I usually use Lightroom for rotation/horizon levelling, perspective control and correcting barrel/pincushion distortion, lens vignetting and chromatic aberration.
Lightroom has some powerful facilities for image comparison and selection. This matters to me because I am often dealing with 600 - 1,000+ images from a morning's shooting (close-ups, out of doors), 90-95% of which will be thrown away. Finding the good ones is, and picking out the best of them, is a significant task, and Lightroom provides powerful facilities to help with this. Although the facilities are powerful and convenient once you know how to use them, the interface can take some time and experimentation to get a handle on. Having done that though, I find it works very well.
Lightroom has some good facilities for adding keywords and other "markers" (red/yellow/green/blue/purple, 0/1/2/3/4/5, flagged/unflagged/rejected) to images and later finding images using those keywords, markers and other information such as filenames, text within metadata, dates, cameras and lenses used, aperture, focal length, use of flash etc. You can also make virtual collections containing images from any of your storage media, so you can assemble sets of images for particular purposes such as presentations. Here too, the interface takes a bit of getting used to.
You can do bulk operations on selected images (which might be in a single folder or in a virtual collection that is spread around multiple folders). This includes things such as setting keywords and markers. You can also do bulk operations when editing images. For example, you can copy the editing settings, or some of them, from one image to other selected images. You can choose which editing settings to copy. For example, when I use a grey card I can set the white balance from it and then copy this white balance across to lots of other images in one move. When I have a set of images of a particular subject, especially when I am having trouble getting the basics right because of problems with the images such as underexposure, I find it extremely useful to be able to work on one, get it right, and then transfer selected settings such as exposure, highlights, shadows etc to all the others with the same issues. When images are in a poor state out of the camera I often do a quick application of changes such as exposure and shadows at the outset so I can see enough to tell which images are worth considering.
There are some things Lightroom does not do very well, or at all. The output sharpening doesn't give me the control I need, and I use CS2 for this. I need strong noise reduction, applied to parts of images, and to achieve this I use layers in CS2 in combination with a pair of images from Lightroom, one with strong noise reduction and one with no noise reduction. For all but the simplest cases, I usually use CS2 for cloning, which in Lightroom I find rather clunky, slow and frustrating to use and sometimes completely ineffective. I use CS2 for some stretching/squashing/warping operations on backgrounds, which is not available in Lightroom. I use CS2 for difficult cases of Highlight reduction and/or Shadow recovery, as its facilities are stronger and more adjustable than Lightroom's.
I find Lightroom and CS2 a good combination for my needs and ways of working. As a result I have no inclination whatsoever to move to Adobe's rental arrangement for more recent versions of CS. This does need to be seen in context though - I do use other software for multi-image work: Autopano Pro for panoramas, Zerene Stacker for stacking close-ups to get more dof, and Photomatix essentials for (realistic) HDR. If I didn't have these other applications then later versions of CS might (I don't know) be more appealing.
It is incidentally very easy to do some processing in Lightroom and then send a tiff file (loses no information) across to CS2 (and also other applications such as AutoPano, Zerene and Photomatix). In fact, you can then if you need to (I virtually never do) save as tiff from CS2 and import it back into Lightroom to work on it some more.
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