OK, my wife wants to be able to manipulate photos, especially in RAW (and then convert to JPG later). She could get Lightroom for this, which is basically Photoshop LITE. Or she could get Corel PSP (for much cheaper). Are there major differences that justify the extra cost of Lightroom?
What about Photoshop Elements? You can frequently find it for $49-99 and until the 16th (tomorrow) Adobe further offers an upgrade to Lightroom for another $99.
The upgrade form PSE to full Photoshop I took advantage of 2 months ago for $299.
Lightroom is not Photoshop lite. Photoshop Elements is Photoshop lite, and comparable to Paint Shop Pro. Lightroom and Paint Shop Pro are nothing alike (unless Paint Shop Pro has changed drastically since I last used it).
What kind of manipulation are you talking about? If it’s fixing exposure, contrast, etc. before exporting from RAW, you want Lightroom. If it’s actually editing the pixels (i.e. to blur, paint something out, etc.), you want Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro.
Lightroom isn’t ‘Photoshop LITE’ - you’re thinking of ‘Photoshop Elements’. Lightroom is geared towards photo processing - tuning exposure, sharpening, dodging, burning etc.
Ah, so it basically has all the things a photographer would need?
Will Lightroom still do everything that Elements does, plus more, then? In other words, will it still edit pixels, etc. in addition to fixing exposure, contrast, etc. (which is the main thing we want, I think).
And is there any reason to get full photoshop if you are just manipulating real photos to make them look better (not morphing them or anything)?
Lightroom is more about workflow.
Lightroom doesn’t do pixel editing. It’s geared toward importing, cataloging, and processing (think developing, hence the name) photos.
No reason to buy the full version of Photoshop. Photoshop Elements has all the features any normal person would want, and there’s probably good freeware out there as well.
How extensive are you manipulating the photos? Are you removing telephone poles and the like? My brother who’s a photographer does 90% of his work with Lightroom, but when he needs to fix someone’s toupee then he’ll use Photoshop. You can always get the free Gimp as a replacement for Photoshop.
Could you elaborate on that a bit, rei?
Here’s the thing. My wife is getting a new camera (a Canon EOS 60D, I think). She wants a program that will help her touch up the pictures in RAW (I don’t know what that means) and then convert them to jpegs. I’m ignorant of all such things. She’s thinking about getting Lightroom because a lot of people who use this camera use that and she can get a deal on it if she buys it with the camera.
I’m just trying to figure out if she’ll need to buy something else anyway, in which case there is no point in getting the Lightroom add.
As I understand it, when you can edit an image as a RAW (the native format for cameras) you’ll have greater ability to adjust major characteristics of the image, like the exposure level. When converting to JPEG or some other format you’ll lose some of those options.
Lightroom is designed to handle lots of photos. I think you can make changes to images in your catalog without fully loading them individually. It also has features to organize them, prepare them for web presentation, etc.
If you have specific questions I can pass them on.
-
A RAW file is the data captured by the sensor with minimal processing. Once you convert to JPG, you lose a lot of data and thus you have less room to change things like exposure without introducing lots of noise and other artifacts.
-
Lightroom is not duplicative of Photoshop Elements and similar programs, nor are those programs duplicative of Lightroom. As far as I know, the only other program comparable to Lightroom is Apple’s Aperture. If you need both sets of features, you need both programs.
-
You can try out Lightroom for 30 days. I’m guessing you can do the same with Photoshop Elements and the like. Try them out now to get a feel for what they do and what kind of stuff you want to do.
Lightroom has very basic touch up capabilities. So you could remove a telephone pole, but it’s not as easy as Photoshop. If you don’t need layers then I think Lightroom is the absolute best program for the job. Adjusting white balance, contrast, adding keywords, sorting etc. is simple and fast. I love it and cant imagine giving it up for something else.
Lightroom is probably what she’s looking for. It’s a tool for managing a giant photo library, converting from RAW to JPEG/whatever, doing various adjustments, and doing very minor touch ups. If you’re seriously into photography, you definitely want it or Aperture, which is Apple’s version of the same thing.
If you’re on a Mac, then Aperture is a substantially cheaper option at $70 on the app store. Most pros seem to prefer Lightroom, but Aperture is perfectly adequate.
Perfect. Thanks for all the help. She’s ordered the camera (the EOS 60D). We did find trial versions, so once the camera arrives and she can take some shots, she can try them both out and see what’s what. Sounds like she might need both eventually anyway (Elements and Lightroom, I mean).
Paintnet is my goto free image editor when I need to do something not requiring Photoshop level power. I think it’s more user friendly than GIMP, and does the important things like allow you to work with layers.
If she winds up doing most of her work in Lightroom, and only needs a bit of image editing power, this would be the most cost effective way. After all, you could always buy a more powerful editor later if needed.
Personally, I use Aperture (equiv. to Lightroom) to do the image-wide stuff (exposure, saturation, levels, curves etc.) and then load the image up in Photoshop if I want to do more localised dodging, burning and sharpening. Your wife may find that she needs both types of programs.
I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned it already but one of the advantages of an app like Lightroom versus Photoshop-style editors is that all of the editing that you do is destructionless. In other words, the actual image is never altered - the program essentially records a script of tweaks and plays them back every time you open a given image. This means that you can do whatever the hell you like with an image and the original, unaltered version is just a couple of clicks away.
And, of course, with Lightroom you can create a new ‘version’ of the original ‘master’ at any point and make completely independent alterations to that new copy - meaning that you can easily produce, say, a black & white copy of a photo and a copy where the colour has been popped to make it more vibrant and ‘hyper-real’.
You can emulate these things with Photoshop, by always working on a copy of your original file, but Lightroom makes it much much easier. Plus, Lightroom (and Aperture) have commands that automatically create a new version of an image, with all of the current alterations baked in and then open that baked-in version in Photoshop (or PSP or whatever) for further editing. When you’re finished editing in Photoshop and save your work, Lightroom will update it’s catalogue to reflect the changes that you’ve made externally to the new version of the file.
Lightroom is fantastic and can be downloaded for $89 given, Robert, you’re an academic. You just have to email them a copy of your ID. I just bought it a couple of weeks ago, and as an beginner not much more advanced than your wife find it much, much more useful than Elements.
I thought the academic discount required them to vet you and make sure you teach classes that would involve that particular program. Do I just need to prove I’m a professor?
Yes, you just need to be a professor.