UKC

looking to get a photo editing software package, these two seem to be the ones that keep coming up in reviews. they are both by adobe- so what's the difference between the two? what would be the reasons for choosing one over the other? lightroom 11 seems to win on price, £50 on amazon just now

and are there any other packages out there that are worth looking at as alternatives?

cheers!

gregor

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:
Lightroom is great..

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

Lightroom is a cataloguing and management tool with limited editing built in whereas Elements is more aimed at editing.
So they are designed to work together with lightroom being used for the general work and then moving into elements (or photoshop) as the situation demands.
That said Lightrooms editing tools have improved over time and my own experience, and from what i have seen quite a few others, is the need to step outside lightroom has reduced over time.

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

Lightroom editing is all non-destructive, ie. it saves what processes you apply rather than an entirely new image (until you export it). If you edit a lot of photos this saves space and prevents accidental overwriting. Cataloguing and editing in the same programme also saves time.

Then again, if you only want to edit a small number of photos each time, you could use something like Picasa to organise then Elements to edit.

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

Elements has a perfectly good organiser built in, with albums, key-wording, catalogs etc etc.

If you shoot RAW, I'd recommend Lightroom, but you may still need some kind of photo editor for detailed manipulation, Lightroom's not so good at that. It has 16 bit processing of images and it's designed for RAW. It will enable you to get the max out of your images.

If you only shoot JPG I'd just get Elements as JPG is only 8 bit and you won't get the benefit of the stuff Lightroom is brilliant at.

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

I'm happy enough with a combo of Lightroom & Photoshop for the majority of my photo editing. I shoot in RAW, and LR handles the files perfectly well. Then again, I only tend to need to do minor adjustments (colour temp, slight crop/tilt etc.) before filing them.

In reply to all:

ok, so if ive got it right:

lightroom is mostly a cataloguing and management tool, with reasonable editing facilities

and elements is mostly an editing tool, with reasonable cataloguing and management facilities...

and there is a case for having both..?

what about freeware like picasa? could it stand in for one or both of the adobe packages?

thanks for the input,

gregor

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs: I rarely use photoshop these days and love Lightroom. For a landscape photographer it's the obvious choice IMHO and really intuitive too.

In reply to Nicholas Livesey:

Most of my stuff is landscape too, plus family snaps... What is it about lightroom that makes it superior for that?

Cheers
Gregor

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

This thread covered much of the same ground:

http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=522961

And it depends what you mean by photo editing - you might want to give more details of what you think you want to do with the software.

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

If you have made a concerted effort to catalogue and tag your images then I strongly suggest that you DO NOT use picassa.

I used this app a year or so ago to try out the face recognition feature. I was planning to find all the images of my friends and tag their names. Picassa completely screwed 30,000 of my images and their tags.

I was not a happy bunny.

In reply to ChrisJD:

thanks for link, had a look and some useful comments on there

i guess the problem is that i'm new to this and don't really know a lot about the potential for editing photos. i guess at this point it will mostly be tidying up the landscape shots i tend to take, with a canon powershot 210. however, i've got access to a DSLR now, so will probably start doing some shooting in RAW and i'm interested to get more out of it than i do at present.

so i'm not entirely sure what i want to do with the software yet, because i'm not really clued up that well about what it *can* do, if that makes sense...

lemming- that sounds a nightmare, avoid picasa then...?

cheers
gregor

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

I am a late digital starter as I hung on to film till bout 4 years ago, so not the most experienced person around. I started with Elements and can now get most things done in it & the level of editing available is beyond what I often need. On the other hand Lightroom's brilliant for fast batch editing & converting to jpegs &/or watermarking. I only bought Lightroom a few months ago, but find one can move from Lightroom to Elements pretty seamlessly. So it depends what you want & how much you'd like to spend, but I'd recommend both to be honest as they form a formidable package together. I'm a very big fan of Adobe's products as they are very user friendly and there's loads of books, website help, magazines and youtube help clips available for them, well definitely more than the others I tried before hand anyway.

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

I use picassa to view many photos and haven't had any problems... normally it shouldn't actually change or move the images - you only manipulate links to your photos. I don't use the editing possibilities at all. For editing I use mostly an old (v 7.02) free version of paintshop pro which I've had for years, and more recently photoshop elements that came free with a scanner. It works well enough but is a little less intuitive than paintshop, probably because you can do a lot more with it.

I haven't tried light room but what has been said above corresponds to what I have read. Beyond that the professional adobe line costs as much as a second hand car, but keen photographers seem to swear by it... whether they acquire it in a less than direct way I wouldn't like to say.

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

Taking that into account, then the answer is easy: Lightroom