Learning the Basics

[yonester]

I'm quite new to life beyond point-and-shoot, and wanted to understand a bit more about post processing. I've been seeing quite a few mentions of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Elements around DPS. Can anyone please clarify for me the difference, and which one (or perhaps both?) I should opt for now that I'm going to start using an SLR and a more serious approach to photography? My main goal is to take/correct pictures of my family (e.g. trips, events, randoms, etc).

Thanks.

[PowerPix]

Have you thought of Gimp? It is free and pretty powerful, almost anything you can do with Adobe software you can do with Gimp.

[vsa]

Photoshop Elements is a stripped down version of Photoshop but has tools that allow you to create stuff from blank canvas (like brush, pen tool and so on). Lightroom is also a sort of version of Photoshop but it's solely designed for photographers. It doesn't have tools like clone stamp or healing brush which let you radically alter the images but is more focused on exposure and color etc.

If you just want to take good photographs you might not need either one but if I had to pick I'd get Lightroom (and then later on full Photoshop cos it's just so awesome xD). Lightroom will most likely teach you more on how to take good photos than Photoshop Elements will. You can get started with the software that is delivered with your SLR camera. As PowerPix said GIMP is free and does almost what Photoshop does (in the hands of a person who knows what s/he's doing) but the learning curve can be very steep. But then again it's totally free. You can also try the free trial versions of Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom which all can be downloaded from Adobe.com.

For photography and file management I highly recommend Lightroom. I'm not sure if Adobe Bridge ships with Photoshop Elements but that's good for file management too. With GIMP you won't get anything close to that (as far as I know).

...and same general advice goes for software as well as hardware: If you don't know why you're getting it, you don't need it.