Lightroom 3 or 4 ???

[2stroke]

I have up until now processed my RAW files in photoshop elements 6. I have recently upgraded the camera which elements 6 with camera raw (i forgot which release but it is the latest it will take) wont do my new sony ACR files. So that means converting first to DNG bla bla bla...

I have been wanting lightroom, feel no real necessity to upgrade elements so I downloaded the 30 day trial of LR3. after about a week of that, I also downloaded the beta of LR4. Since both were equally new to me the learning curve is about the same. So far I am liking LR4 better, I think it does a better job of extracting detail from the a580's file. I also love the temperature and noise as brushes.

Soooo...

I would prefer 4 but I am a cheapskate where possible and am thinking what is the best route economically for me now.

Buy LR3 now (discounted price) about $150 then upgrade to 4 when released? Is the upgrade price expected to be about $100?

Any idea on the price point of LR4? Will it fall in line with the ~$300?

Besides the obvious layers and stuff that lightroom doesnt do, one thing that I think is missing in LR3 & 4 is a dodge and burn like photoshop does where it can be limited to highlights, mid, shadows.

[ErikUngerPhotography]

I'm guessing LR4 will be $299 and I believe the upgrade price is usually $99. Can't say for certain though.

LR3 has really quickly grown on me and I am constantly finding new ways to touch up specific areas where it wasn't possible in LR3. I've also pretty much stopped using PS CS4 except for only very specific reasons (heavy cloning and a few plugins that work much better through PS).

My problem right now is that I don't want to use LR3 anymore and just use the 4 Beta, but I heard there is no guarantee the final version will recognize changes made in the Beta. Hope this is not the case, though most of my really important work I will still do in LR3.

As for the dodge and burn, I have found something that works very well for me. I was touching up some portraits that I took today. I had one strobe to my left and would try to position a reflector on my right, but wasn't have much luck with the reflector. To help brighten the right side of the models face, I used a brush with only exposure bumped up just a tad. Once the area was "painted," I then adjusted the shadow slider up which kept the midtones and highlights pretty much alone, but it helped bring out the shadows nicely. Same thing can be done the reverse.

The adjustment brush is slowly replacing my need for layers, and I will be the first one to tell that layers and layer masking in PS is just about the greatest thing ever. I think the one thing they need to add that will help organizing all your adjustment brushes is to have a section dedicated to listing all of your brushes and allow you to apply a name towards them. Sometimes I can have 10 or more of this dots scattered over the image and some very close together and have to select each one to see where it is affecting the image. Give me a list to see them all and name them so I can select the one I need much faster. If they did this, I think adjustment brushes could replace layer/layer masking. That and add actual cloning.