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08-06-2018, 10:06 AM   #16
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People should take Michaelina2's advice about PDCU to heart. It does almost everything most of us want to do and is not that much more complex to use than other packages.

08-06-2018, 11:32 AM   #17
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QuoteOriginally posted by Adam Quote
Adobe has killed off this product line. Below is the last standalone version of LR, which includes all camera/lens updates through December, 2017, but none thereafter:
But it's still also available directly from Adobe for now. Permanent license.

Lightroom organises your photo collection as well as performing non-destructive edits: exposure, contrast, brightness, tweaking highlights/midtones/shadows are a breeze in Lightroom. It also stitches panoramas and has tons of actions available for 1-click preset processing.

Photoshop (I still use CS4 with Bridge and Camera Raw 5.2) is the photo editor par excellence and can do everything Lightroom does in photo editing plus immense amounts more. Whether you use it destructively (no going back) or non-destructively is up to your workflow, but if you want to focus stack, play with luminosity masks, selectively blend bracketed exposures, combine different images into a composite one, selectively remove or add details or any amount of other creative work, you'll need a proper photo editor and Photoshop is the industry standard for good reason. It also takes quite some time to learn properly – I did say it does immense amounts more than Lightroom.

The Adobe Tax for photographers isn't too onerous, but I quite understand why you would want to pay for a permanent license and be done with it. I still use Photoshop CS4 etc. because it reads the .DNG images from my K-7 without issues.

Last edited by StiffLegged; 08-06-2018 at 12:23 PM.
08-06-2018, 03:48 PM   #18
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QuoteOriginally posted by StiffLegged Quote
But it's still also available directly from Adobe for now. Permanent license.

Lightroom organises your photo collection as well as performing non-destructive edits: exposure, contrast, brightness, tweaking highlights/midtones/shadows are a breeze in Lightroom. It also stitches panoramas and has tons of actions available for 1-click preset processing.

Photoshop (I still use CS4 with Bridge and Camera Raw 5.2) is the photo editor par excellence and can do everything Lightroom does in photo editing plus immense amounts more. Whether you use it destructively (no going back) or non-destructively is up to your workflow, but if you want to focus stack, play with luminosity masks, selectively blend bracketed exposures, combine different images into a composite one, selectively remove or add details or any amount of other creative work, you'll need a proper photo editor and Photoshop is the industry standard for good reason. It also takes quite some time to learn properly – I did say it does immense amounts more than Lightroom.

The Adobe Tax for photographers isn't too onerous, but I quite understand why you would want to pay for a permanent license and be done with it. I still use Photoshop CS4 etc. because it reads the .DNG images from my K-7 without issues.
Yes, Lightroom standalone version $149 from Adobe.com.

Or, Lightroom and Photoshop @ $9.99 per month on the plan. Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan | Professional photo editing software
08-06-2018, 04:04 PM - 1 Like   #19
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QuoteOriginally posted by StiffLegged Quote
Photoshop (I still use CS4 with Bridge and Camera Raw 5.2) is the photo editor par excellence and can do everything Lightroom does in photo editing plus immense amounts more.
Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's as easy to do things in Photoshop. Vignetting would be a good example (disclaimer - it's a while since I played with full Photoshop... maybe the latest versions have a simple control like Lightroom for this kind of thing, without having to select areas or add layer masks).

One of the good things about Lightroom, and tools like it (such as Darktable) is the ability to very quickly and easily perform certain processing tasks...

08-07-2018, 07:49 PM   #20
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QuoteOriginally posted by roberts_camera Quote
Hi!

I am currently looking at my options for buying a permanent copy of LR to avoid constantly paying each month for the subscription plan (I sometimes go months without taking pictures, so it feels like a waste of money. I'd like to just invest once and be done). I just received an email from Newegg saying that a Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements bundle will be on sale tomorrow (8/6) for $75. That leads to a couple of questions...

1) What can Lightroom do that Photoshop can't? I mainly used Lightroom in the past to change exposure, shadows, contrast, etc. Rarely did I do touch ups or anything similar to that, I almost exclusively fixed lighting and cropped. Maybe use the smart clone tool to remove some dust spots from the sensor. Stitch pics together for a panorama. For those uses, could I just use PS? Or does LR have some functionality that PS doesn't?

2) If PS would fit the bill for what I am looking for, what exactly is Photoshop Elements? What does the "Elements" mean? Would this work for me? And Premiere is just video editing, correct?

Thanks so much in advance! Hopefully I can get some good input tomorrow before the sale ends.
I'm not an expert but I think the handwriting is on the wall to the extent that it would be questionable to invest in the non-CC version of Lightroom now.

I have a somewhat older PSE version and it's nice, but although it runs ACR (the raw converter), it's important that only is PSE somewhat feature-limited, its ACR "Lite" is also feature-limited compared to the the ACR is other Adobe applications. In fact I think that's a bigger limitation for most people than whatever limitations PSE itself has.
08-07-2018, 09:10 PM - 2 Likes   #21
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I just about live in Lightroom, but to people obsessed with paying big bucks for cameras and lenses yet wanting to pay nothing for software, I can suggest PhotoScape X in addition to the others mentioned.
08-07-2018, 09:26 PM - 1 Like   #22
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QuoteOriginally posted by clackers Quote
I just about live in Lightroom, but to people obsessed with paying big bucks for cameras and lenses yet wanting to pay nothing for software, I can suggest PhotoScape X in addition to the others mentioned.
Never thought of it that way!

A new (cheaper end of the range) 50mm lens equates to around three years of Lightroom and Photoshop subscription.

08-08-2018, 12:56 AM   #23
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QuoteOriginally posted by MarkJerling Quote
Never thought of it that way!

A new (cheaper end of the range) 50mm lens equates to around three years of Lightroom and Photoshop subscription.
Indeed, on the other hand I am using a standalone version of LR for nearly 4 years now and I don't see me switching anywhere for at least another 2 years. The 2 or 3 times a year I would need PS I come by with gimp too, so for my needs the subscription model would be pricier without getting a real benefit out of it.
It all depends on your personal workflow and the kind of pictures you wanna take or create, for my needs the subscription model doesn't work.
08-08-2018, 02:21 AM   #24
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QuoteOriginally posted by clackers Quote
I just about live in Lightroom, but to people obsessed with paying big bucks for cameras and lenses yet wanting to pay nothing for software, I can suggest PhotoScape X in addition to the others mentioned.
QuoteOriginally posted by MarkJerling Quote
Never thought of it that way!

A new (cheaper end of the range) 50mm lens equates to around three years of Lightroom and Photoshop subscription.
On that point - and it's a very valid one - I've never had an issue with paying for Lightroom stand-alone / perpetual. If they'd released a version 7, I'd have been right at the front of the queue to buy it, as I really liked the software. It's merely the subscription / rental model that puts me off - but that's just me. I can see how and why that model works for others, and why it can be good value for money.

The tools I'm using now may be free and open-source, but that's really not a big factor in my decision to use them. Had they been perptual-licence commercial software packages, I'd have been quite happy to pay for them. But free they most certainly are, and I can't deny that an extra GBP £120 per year in my pocket is welcome. Just one year of that will buy me another GX-10 / K10D if one of mine should fail
08-08-2018, 02:32 AM - 1 Like   #25
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QuoteOriginally posted by BigMackCam Quote
On that point - and it's a very valid one - I've never had an issue with paying for Lightroom stand-alone / perpetual. If they'd released a version 7, I'd have been right at the front of the queue to buy it, as I really liked the software. It's merely the subscription / rental model that puts me off - but that's just me. I can see how and why that model works for others, and why it can be good value for money.
Indeed. My CAD software costs me upward of $2,000 per year to keep up to date. Lightroom + Photoshop is very cheap, comparatively speaking, at $119.88 per year. I could work around not having Lightroom, but I need Photoshop. Lightroom is therefore practically free for me.
08-31-2018, 02:55 PM   #26
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Affinity Software is a good alternative to Photoshop, and in the long run cheaper:
$49.99 (no subscription) outright vs. $10 a month
08-31-2018, 03:44 PM   #27
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I'm late to the party, but many (most?) Photoshop users are also Lightroom users. If you ever work with more than a few dozen photos at a time, Lightroom is a tremendous productivity enhancer. On the other hand, if your workflow consists of taking a single photo and then editing individual elements of the photo (not adjustments to the entire image), Photoshop is all you need. A common workflow is to organize and process all of the images from a photographic session in Lightroom and then edit individual images in Photoshop.


In film terms, Lightroom is developing and printing directly from negatives; Photoshop is composing a paste-up (in olden days, copy editors would paste the various elements of a page to be published on a whiteboard/copyboard/pasteboard, take a photograph of the composite page and then print from that photograph). Photoshop allows you to put elements on different layers and combine or blend the layers in different ways, it allows you to directly "paint" on a layer and it gives you as much control over how the final image is rendered as you could possibly want; none of these things can be done in Lightroom, but they are manipulations that don't work in batch mode, they are time-consuming and it takes time to learn how to do these things. Lightroom is more intuitive than Photoshop for doing overall changes to images and showing you the effect of those changes, especially if you are working with more than one image at a time.

As others have said, Photoshop Elements is a stripped down version of Photoshop Proper. The thing to remember is that any version of Photoshop is designed for pixel by pixel editing and you can create pixels in an image that weren't in the photograph. If you don't have to do this type of editing, you can process a lot more images in the same time with Lightroom.
08-31-2018, 04:08 PM   #28
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I have both Photoshop CS6 and whatever the comparable version of Lightroom is. Haven't touched Lightroom in years and no longer even have it installed.

I can get lost in a photo and easily spend hours editing it in Photoshop. Lightroom is more straightforward, but at the same time your options, or what you can do with each photo, is more limited. As such, your workflow with LR is likely going to be more structured. But that's not a knock on Lightroom. It's actually a very powerful tool. If I were a professional portrait or wedding photographer for example, working with large groups of photos in one sitting, or someone that was constantly downloading photos to my hard drive I would for sure utilize Lightroom.

When it comes to editing, LR is a bit like a paring knife in that it's perfect for a lot of quick work; PS is more like a scalpel or Swiss Army knife in that you have many more tools available and that it offers an almost endless possibility for creative adjustments.

Many photographers work back and forth, first with LR and then with PS. Some professionals use only LR. And some only PS. It's just a matter of what suits you and your needs.

I also have Raw Therapee which is free and appears promising. Unfortunately it crashes frequently on my machine so I've never learned its capabilities.

And now I see this is a pretty old thread...

Last edited by JHfwp; 08-31-2018 at 09:13 PM.
09-05-2018, 08:43 AM   #29
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For me, Lightroom is a very competent asset manager with very limited image processing abilities. Photoshop is a very competent image processor with very limited asset management abilities.
For me, the advantage of the “non destructive” processing abilities of Lightroom is a non starter. Sure it shows you all the cool stuff you would be doing to a file if you committed to the changes, but if you decide you don’t like where you are at, you can only revert to the initial state (I’ve found no way around that).
With Photoshop, you always have the initial state available by saving as a new file, and with Photoshop you can tell it to keep as many history states as you want, so if you decide you don’t like where you are you can return precisely to where you were happy.
09-05-2018, 10:26 AM   #30
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QuoteOriginally posted by Wheatfield Quote
For me, Lightroom is a very competent asset manager with very limited image processing abilities. Photoshop is a very competent image processor with very limited asset management abilities.
For me, the advantage of the “non destructive” processing abilities of Lightroom is a non starter. Sure it shows you all the cool stuff you would be doing to a file if you committed to the changes, but if you decide you don’t like where you are at, you can only revert to the initial state (I’ve found no way around that).
With Photoshop, you always have the initial state available by saving as a new file, and with Photoshop you can tell it to keep as many history states as you want, so if you decide you don’t like where you are you can return precisely to where you were happy.
There is a protocol of what you did in the developing menu in LR, but this of course only works properly for the initial picture you worked on and not the other pictures you just copied the developing settings onto.
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