Photoshop Elements to Lightroom

[TexKen]

I was wondering if anyone out there has made the jump from Photoshop Elements to Lightroom and would care to comment on the differences. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it.

[mbradley]

let me try this and see if everyone agrees.

PH Ele is an image editing program that allows you to make modification to the images individually. Think of it as Baby Photoshop, in that you work directly with the image file and your modifications are made to that file.

Lightroom is more of the "Film processing software" where you would look at the whole roll (card), and make modifications such as wb, tone, color, etc, while processing it. You still can make the changes individually, but it's more of a work flow process. If major editing is required, you would still open the image in PH (either Ele or CS3 eX), done right from Lightroom. Lightroom doesn't make changes to the "film", but rather holds those changes in it's database.

If you shot alot of digital photos, lightroom is well worth the price for speedy processing.

hope this helps. :)

[TexKen]

Thanks Mark. I figured there was batch processing advantages in Lightroom. Right now, I can open multiple images in ACR from Elements and apply the same WB corrections for example, but I'm thinking there must be a more efficient way.

Now.... for the people that use Lightroom, how much of their image editing is done within Lightroom and what % requires CS3 or similar.

[barP]

i do serious photoshop now on maybe 10% of my images. if it's a showpiece that needs sophisticated processing, there's no substitute, but when i need to crank out 1000 images from a shoot, all with minor corrections, lightroom is da bomb!

wp.

[Paulo]

I use Lightroom 100% of the time but my post-processing routine is very simple: WB corrections as needed, presets, fill/black adjustments. I love the speed of batch processing but if you do a lot of cloning, individual layer corrections of foreground/background, your PS Elements will still be useful.

BTW, this was posted by another member but there is a Beta version of Lightroom 2.0 out:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

[mbradley]

Lightroom has raw support for most camera formats built in, so there is no switching to ACR like you have to do with PH or Ele.

I use Lightroom about 90% of the time. And with with changes coming in Vs2, it'll probably be closer to 98%. I downloaded the betas for Mac and Pc this morning, and hopefully I'll have time to play with them this evening.

[icephoto]

Originally Posted by TexKen

Now.... for the people that use Lightroom, how much of their image editing is done within Lightroom and what % requires CS3 or similar.

I find that I will still spend 60-65% of my edit time in CS, but the things that Lightroom does for my workflow are incredible. Picking the images I want to work with is much quicker. Once I have what I want to work on, getting the large editing tasks (color, cropping, and some curve work) is much quicker and much more precise. I'll then export to a file for further fine tuning later.

I'm holding off on keywording until I can make the decision as to whether or not I want to make the move to CS3 (and Bridge) or stay with CS.

Warm regards - jim

[TexKen]

Originally Posted by icephoto

I'm holding off on keywording until I can make the decision as to whether or not I want to make the move to CS3 (and Bridge) or stay with CS.

I thought Lightroom was a pretty stout organizer too. It doesn't offer the ability to add tags?

[icephoto]

It appears to do a pretty good job. But I've heard that Bridge is stronger and I'm not going to start the process in one just to have to start over on a second (done that a few times...). Far too many pictures in my libraries to do that more than once.

[TexKen]

Is it not possible to import keywords from PS Elements to Lightroom or Lightroom to Bridge? All Adobe products. It would be a shame if they didn't consider the user who wants to upgrade.