Elements or Lightroom

[Starbuck]

I am so confused!!!

Hello I am a newbie to the advanced post-processing!

So I have been using Picasa for some time now and I love it, but I think I am ready to advance so to say...not that there is anything wrong with Picasa but I want to do more with my photos...

So now I am confused between the options..I understand CS might be more complex and out of my price range (like way out of my budget!!!), but I can see that Elements and Lightroom are more in my budget...
So I have been trying to figure out the difference between the two and can't seem to grasp it.

Will anyone be kind enough to help out and give their opinion of the two and what exactly we can do with Elements and what I can do with Lightroom?? What are the major diffrences between the two??

Note: I am amateur photographer, I am not looking for anything complex, just something to make my pictures stand out a bit, adjust colors etc.

Thank you in advance

[teaking]

Hopefully some light rooms users will browse through here and give you the full low down, from what I understand elements is a pixel editor similar to photoshop and gives you tools to do that like clone, heal, curves? and enables you to use complex layers and masks.

Light room is like a development module giving you sliders to correct white balance, exposure, tint etc. From what I have heard around the forum you can apply effects to areas but it doesnt support layers and multiple layer masks.

But lightroom does enable you to catalogue your images so its probably more geared towards photo editing than photo manipulation such as for a magazine shoot where they smooth skin, dodge and burn, colour correct, all on seperate layers. But you can do all your usual edits you want to do with a photo.

[xdavis24]

You may also want to look at Gimp (GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program) which is an open source editor with many of the functionalities of photoshop.

[Saralonde]

I have Lightroom 3, Photoshop CS5 and Elements 7. I know there are many people that love Lightroom, but since I am used to Photoshop, Lightroom was not as helpful to me. Most of the things I used LR for were in Camera RAW, which I think also comes with Elements. Elements does a lot of the things Photoshop does and is by far the cheapest of the bunch. I'm sure you can find it on sale somewhere.

Of course, this is personal opinion, and I'm sure you'll find a lot of votes for LR.

[zona5101]

teaking summed it up nicely. Lightroom's strongest suit is its organization, sorting, stacking, cataloging power. it has strong image correction tools for color, contrast, vibrance, saturation etc. The new version 3.x has excellent noise reduction tool. You can do some limited immage manipulation too with a clone/healing brush, a graduated filter, red eye removal, cropping tool and probably the best tool, the adjustment brush which allows you to create a custom brush to adjust about all the controls in a single brush. LR is not photoshop, it does not do layers, it can not do some of the advanced thing PS can do. They are two different animals. I have both CS5 and LR and I can say that 99% of the adjustments I do in lightroom. It's only when I need to do something really out of the ordinary do I pop it over to PS. You can download trial versions of lightroom (and ps) from Adobe.com

[ShantDotMe]

for me it is LR!! it is pretty odd @ the begining, I almost ditched it!! but then I read some "how-to"s & than you get the concept, features... it makes your life way easier!

If you have to choose one, then go for LR, read some tips/tricks & download some presets & I'm pretty sure you won't regret it. As said download a trial from adobe.com first.

for bitmap editing you can always use GIMP which is totally free!!

[Saralonde]

Downloading trial versions? Always a good idea! Just give yourself time to test them out. You won't figure out everything they can do in a weekend.

[Starbuck]

Thank you all so much! Looks like LR is winning lol
I will take your advice and actually download both trials and see which works better for me What a good idea! I didn't know they had free trials!!

[vinodkdavid]

thank u so much STARBUCK. coz i have same confusion too. wt i understand is lightroom is more of quantity and less manipulation rather than elements which is more meant for manipulation.. if any body has more opnions plz do put forward for this beginner...

vinod

[kirbinster]

Lightroom rocks, it will do almost everything most people need to do to most photos. It is designed for photos, whereas photoshop and elements are designed for anything and everything the eye can see. Lightroom combines digital assett management with very good editing. True it does not do pixel level editing, but that is not needed for most photos.