PS Elements 10 or Lightroom4

[lilmira]

I just started taking pics with my GX1. There is a promote of 50% off for PS Elements 10 at Adobe, sounds like a pretty good deal. Or should I just get the Lightroom? I have never done any photo-editing, wouldn't mind learning now. Would Lightroom be better since Elements doesn't do raw?

[Zorac]

although i really liked using the combination of adobe raw and adobe photoshop, i coudlnt jsutify the price. could never really get to liking elements or lightroom, and instead when with acdsee pro. might be worth some consideration. to be fair, i did the comparison a few versions ago though. lightroom and its database setup drove me crazy, and elements just lacked to many features to justify its price. 16bit editing was one of the big ones to me.

on the odd occation i need to do more indepth editing involving layers, i use gimp.

http://www.acdsee.com/en/products/acdsee-pro-5

[stefan15]

I think it comes down significantly to workflow and whether or not you need RAW. I personally like the flow in LR so I'd go with that, but you should trial both.

[lilmira]

Thanks, I might have to try them all first.

[Mitsu3000gt]

Do you know anyone at all who is a student or a teacher/professor? If so they can get you the full Photoshop CS5 for $200.

[rage2]

You can demo lightroom for free. I only use LR now, and the highlight and shadow recovery engine in LR4 is amazing (well compared to LR3 anyways). Much bigger range. Workflow is a lot easier in LR than Photoshop, I routinely edit 50+ pics at a time, and it's a PITA in Photoshop, where as all my settings can be copied to all photos in the set with similar lighting, and I make minimal changes between each picture. But ya, all depends on your needs if that workflow works for you on not.

LR is pretty cheap too. LR4 sells for $149 new, $79 upgrade. Not sure for educational price. I only use photoshop now to, well, photoshop crap lol. Haven't upgraded it since CS2, not worth the money.

Here's my first day playing with it, I had a hell of a time shooting the McLaren, super bright sun, just ruined all the pics. LR4 fixed it up nicely.

[lilmira]

So I played with both LR and Elements a bit last night. I did use LR to fix a picture that I screwed up the camera setting. For that purpose, LR is definitely the one to use.

I do have a lot of images scanned from old negatives that I'd like to fix when I have time. Some of them are pretty deteriorated to the point that I'd probably have to crop only the good part of the image out. I'm also thinking about doing some "scrap-booking", combining multiple images together. For that, Elements might be the one to use. Am I right?

I haven't try the ACDSEE one yet? I'll probably try it too when I have time. Is there one program that does it all or am I asking too much? I don't know any students or teachers, it'd be nice not having to spend a thousand bucks.

[dragonone]

i think LR will cover most of your needs, but for fixing old negatives, most tutorials i've read involve photoshop. content-aware fill may do wonders for you. the program that does it all is photoshop, tho as some have pointed out, it's not as convenient when you have batches of images to go through.

[mboldt]

With the new crazy price of LR4, definitely go for it.

The entire purpose of raw is quality & processing ability.

LR4 is professional quality / functionality in a piece of software the consumer can use without being overwhelmed.

[lilmira]

Any one tried making their own photobook? Been thinking about gathering bits and pieces of old family photos into one big print. After playing with LR, making my own photobook might be even better.

Should have jumped on the Elements deal for 50 bucks, oh well.

[clem24]

Just bought LR4. Microstore just got them in for educational pricing @ $80.

[lilmira]

That's quite a bit of saving. Do they have elements there too?

Wish I was still in school but then I wouldn't have money for toys.

[AccentAE86]

I bought LR4 and went back to LR2.

I'm not sure if this is normal, but it's fricken SLOW! I don't have a slow computer either. The image takes a long time to update when you alter a setting. This slows down my editing by a factor of 3! Seriously NOT impressed. It's fine for a set of 50 photos, but when you are trying to blast through 700 it is a serious slowdown to my workflow.


If you are shooting jpegs, I just use Picasa. It has a lot of adjustments in there that work for many photos. You can even copy and paste all your adjustments to multiple photos simultaneously, much like Lightroom. And then for localized editing like skin retouching, Elements would probably be fine.

I personally like to avoid RAW whenever possible. It's a PITA. I almost never use RAW for fun or personal shooting.

[dragonone]

i think u can speed it up by creating a copy via import, rather than it making a copy every time you click on an image?

[rage2]

I'm on a laptop, and yes LR4 is slower than LR3 (which is slower than LR2), but it's managable for me, as I only edit 30-50 pics at a time.

Looking at my CPU graphs, it looks like LR4 is very CPU intensive... the new rendering engine is doing a lot more work than previous versions.

I've gotten used to the lag now (image time to update when you alter a setting), so I can look at a pic, and generally know what and how much to change right off the bat, so I would make 6 changes before looking at the lagged preview, which works well. It's not that bad, typically, a change to a setting will show up about 0.5s after a change. After I do one image, I usually copy the settings and apply it to similarly lit photos in the batch, and do minor corrections to each one.

But ya, I can see working with 700 pics being a PITA.

[AccentAE86]

I generate previews upon import.

I also put the LR cache and catalog on an SSD drive. I'm a veteran LR user so I know all the tricks. But it's still a lot slower than LR2.

I also use an editing keypad, so I don't use the sliders. So if I want to change the exposure by one stop, I can't just change it one stop, I can only move them by .33 stop increments. So it tries to generate a preview for each step. LR2 could keep up with my keypress adjustments, LR4 is hopeless!

[rage2]

Try 4.1RC. It's supposed to be a lot faster for step by step adjustments.

[pizdets17]

LR4 is brutally slow. Went back to 3 same week 4 came out. And I ran it on an i7 laptop with sata3 ssd and 8gb ram+1gb dedicated video.

[rage2]

Decided to download LR4.1 RC2 today to check it out. It's blazing fast compared to LR4. Available on Adobe's site.

[Go4Long]

I may actually have to purchase LR4...although I shoot a lot less of late.