I am not familiar with Lightroom, but have used Photoshop and Elements for many years. More recently I've found Faststone to be excellent for routine processing, and it makes for a fast workflow. For anything too advanced, I just shell out of Faststone and open the image in Elements, then drop back to Faststone to finish it. Faststone is free, and opens all file types equally well (including .pef and any other raw file). You can download it from
FastStone Image Viewer, Screen Capture, Photo Resizer ... -- even though it says "FastStone Image Viewer" it is MUCH more than just a viewer or organizer. The recent release has cloning and healing which is especially great for those of us who shoot and scan film (OUT damn spot!).
-Joe-