Which photoshop do I buy? Elements, CS4?? Help!!

[windrider86]

I also use Paint Shop Pro. its a 1/3 of the price of Photoshop and can do everything PS can do. For me, the program is much easier to use

[damber]

Originally Posted by jpel3500

So is Lightroom a stand alone program or do you have to have Elements or one of the other Photoshop programs to run it? A little confused on that subject. LOL. And with that question being asked; Would you recommend using Lightroom without one of the other Photoshop programs (if it can be done)? Or would Elements be enough by itself? hehehe. I know, alot of questions!
Just reading through and wondering about that, as I didn't really see it described apart from Elements or CS4 or something else.
BTW, I've been taking pictures for years, but getting into photography more now. Never really done much PP work, but IF I am going to spend the bucks, I want something that will last a while.

Thanks,

JDPelfrey

Lightroom is a standalone program - and is really about photo development and management. It's competitors (similar tools) are products like Aperture (Mac), Bibble (Win, Mac, Linux), Capture One, DxO and a few others.

These tools really provide two things:

1) The digital equivalent of film development (e.g. dark room full of smelly chemicals etc) that develops your RAW (or JPEG or TIFF, though RAW is better) into an interpretation of the RAW data (e.g. it decides what red actually looks like), giving you the ability to adjust tones, sharpness, apply filters, distortion corrections, colour mgmt/working space, CA corrections, exposure adjustment, contrast, curves, white balance etc. There's usually a lot of stuff you can do with plugins, and the latest version of Lightroom and Bibble (not sure about Aperture), also allow basic editing such as cloning, healing (which you're probably already familiar with) and in Bibble's case, it has layer support.

2) Photo library management, that allows you to manage your workflow (e.g. import, select, adjust, output) and has various features that allows you to select candidates, compare different shots side by side, flag your preferred shots, edit meta data, organise into libraries, arrange/filter by date, lens, location, rating, colour flags, multiple versions of the same image, without duplicating the original file (just the adjustments are stored as different versions), and it allows batch processing aswell, e.g. from presets or manually, etc, etc

And it does all of the above non-destructively - so your original image will remain intact and not be damaged by any processing you do. You also don't need multiple copies of the same image, which takes up space, as you would in CS4/5,etc.

This is the type of tool you want if you are into photography - it is all about the photographer's workflow requirements, and organisation of what ends up as thousands of images.

Photoshop CS4/5, PSP, Gimp, etc, are all Image editing tools, which can be used to take a 'developed' image from something like lightroom, bibble, aperture, etc (aswell as import directly) and modify pixels (e.g. you can draw a physical line, sprinkle dots, cut out bits of the image, etc) or apply more advanced filters (many of which are or will become part of things like lightroom/aperture/bibble), or work with multiple source images to create a composite, or advanced effects/tools (e.g. HDR merge, content aware fill, advanced warping etc). The point of these tools is more about 'editing' than 'developing' or 'organising', and are not just for 'photographs'... despite the name :-) e.g. you cannot create an image from scratch in Lightroom, but you can in Photoshop.

The choice is yours. Using a photo management app, like Lightroom, Bibble, Aperture is going to be better for your general needs as a photographer than a tool which is designed for image editing, so I would suggest you get one of these as a priority. If you want more power in your image editing (e.g. for compositing or more advanced effects etc), then you have decide how much power you can afford... GIMP is very good for most needs (and is free), though it does lack features, and a bit of usability IMO compared to Photoshop CS 4/5 - which is probably the 'best' you can buy, but also the most expensive. It's a long time since I used PSP, so no idea how good this is now. I've not used Elements, so not sure how limited it is, though I don't think features like HDR are available.

Lightroom and Photoshop work together fairly well, though I'm not sure about Photoshop Elements (e.g. how automatic is the transition from one tool to another)

I use Bibble 5.1 Pro (always) and GIMP (mostly) or PS CS4 (sometimes) on my linux workstation and laptop. You can definitely do pretty much everything a general photographer would need in Bibble+GIMP - both are cross platform aswell.

Hope that helps.

[joeleszc]

Thats some recap for a first time posting, thank you for the explanation.

[JohnT]

I have Photoshop CS3, Elements 8, Paintshop Pro X2, and PhotoImpact X13 (ulead, Nova now Corel)

I like PhotoImpact the best. It does more than elements, equal to Paintshop Pro, and less learning curve than CS3. It is such a good program I learned to do animations in GA5, make things out of objects and can do most photo projects in half the time it takes to accomplish in the other programs. Having all of them I am very biased on what works quick but also has the tools to go way beyond average use.