What to get?

footydad

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Edit My Images
Yes
I'm thinking about buying Photoshop Elements or Lightroom to edit my photos. I'm sure this has been discussed in previous threads, but I'm unsure which is best for my needs. I tend to shoot mainly football and keep it all in jpeg rather than raw.
 
I use both PE10 & LR5.

LR most of the time but PE to do the more detailed stuff - selections, layers, masks, type of thing. I have used the full Photoshop software but nothing in that for me & the way I work.

You can download 30 day trials of them all from Adobe.
 
I was going to say that most of my edits are 'limited' and therefore Lightroom suffices for well over 95% of my stuff, but when I though about it, the edits in Lightroom are far from basic, so didn't want to give the wrong impression!

Most of the time my edits are crops, straightens, exposure and levels, minor spot / blemish correction, clarity, saturation, boost whites and blacks, perhaps add a graduated filter to bring back the sky, occasionally boost a range of colours (grasses, sky etc), Lens correction. Sometimes to all the image, sometimes to local areas only and so on.

Lightroom caters for all of these and more, with the added bonus that it (for me at least), does a good job of managing and cataloging images.

I use Photoshop (CS5, but latterly Elements 12 'cos it's quicker on my 2009 iMac) only when I need to work with layers (typically for major image tidy up, re-composition) - I find the healing brush tool in Lightroom slows down a lot when you have a lots of corrections on a single image (50+), but even under these circumstances, I will only do the layer work in Elements - I still use Lightroom for the 'mundane' elements.
 
The two programs compliment each other really, Lightroom for a quick bulk edit (raw or jpeg) and Elements for the clever tricky stuff lightroom doesn't do (layers/swopping heads etc) if your only making very simple ajustments to colour exposure etc lightroom with do fine.
 
if your only making very simple ajustments to colour exposure etc lightroom with do fine.

Just for clarity though, in case the OP is not familiar with LR's capabilities, it goes a long long way beyond simple adjustments.
 
Thanks for all the replies, most of my edits are crop, a bit of exposure and a bit of sharpening. Lightroom looks like it may be worth going for. Only trouble is I think it needs windows 7 and I've got an old PC with vista...........
 
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