Elements or Lightroom

[mughees_javed]

For me, the deal is that with Lightroom, you can do some pretty cool stuff quickly, in a "batch mode" kind of way, and go from RAW to pretty picture quickly. Did I mention that it's all done relatively quickly?

What I mean is that, say you have a string of 20 pictures of the same subject in the same light, same background, etc. You adjust the WB, tone, etc., for one, then apply it to the other 19. To me, endlessly fiddling w/ a picture quickly becomes a pain the neck. With Lightroom I can weed out the crap and concentrate on the few keepers with a minimum of fuss & hassle. Any form of PS seems to slow the whole process down a whole lot.

Read more at: Elements and Lightroom... - PentaxForums.com

[Photologyst]

I am a big LR fan. Rarely use PS these days, unless it’s for something special.

If I were on a limited budget I would get LR and Elements or free GIMP.

Best of both worlds.

[JohnTait]

Use Amazifier, which is a nice and simple photo editor.
Resizing, Cropping, Flipping & Rotating is really easy in Amazifier Image editor. It's a free one like Paint.net and PhotoScape but Amazifier is far more simple and a has real cool look and feel.
Its good for 99% of the photo editing I do...
It has some nice Photo effects , Photo frames, Stickers and many more
things ..
You can get it from their website at Amazifier - Fun and Easy Photo Enhancing for FREE!.

[NicolaB]

No competition. LR hands down - then CS5.

I do 90% of my editing in LR and it is so, so easy. I would recommend the Scott Kelby book to get you started.

I also have CS5, but if I could only have one, I would start with LR.

[inkista]

Originally Posted by mughees_javed

For me, the deal is that with Lightroom, you can do some pretty cool stuff quickly, in a "batch mode" kind of way, and go from RAW to pretty picture quickly. Did I mention that it's all done relatively quickly?

What I mean is that, say you have a string of 20 pictures of the same subject in the same light, same background, etc. You adjust the WB, tone, etc., for one, then apply it to the other 19. ...

You can do this with ACR, too, (there's a synchronize button).

Everything you can do in Lightroom's "Library" module, you can do with Bridge. Everything in LR's "Develop" module, you can do with ACR (except possibly non-destructive cropping by default). It's the same code base at the bottom.

The difference is the accessibility to those functions and integration into a single interface, as well as the default of keeping everything as a RAW file with non-destructive editing and just creating separate edits for the RAW data, rather than creating a PSD copy of the file with the ACR adjustments. Lightroom is more streamlined and workflow-oriented, with the easiest accessibility to the most-used functions for photography (for example, the hotkey to rate a photograph at 3 stars in LR is just 3, while in ACR, it's Cmd-3 [I'm on a mac]).

Most folks without a lot of Photoshop experience see Lightroom as easier to use than the Bridge/ACR/Photoshop combo, but Photoshop not only do everything Lightroom can do, it can also do a ton of things that Lightroom can't. Masks, layers, alpha channels, etc. etc.

Think of Lightroom as the 10% of Photoshop you use 90% of the time as a photographer.

[JFSanders]

Or, since you are a Nikon user you could get NX2 and get all of the U point tech that photoshop uses without having to learn masks and layers. You can even get the Nikeffects software that is designed for LR and it will work with NX2 but I don't use much of the Nik stuff except for Color effects pro. I believe NX2 is around 180 dollars and it has all of the cataloging, rating, and RAW functions you will ever need and does a very good job of editing and developing photographs, especially Nikon RAW.


Jim