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Forum: Digital Processing, Software, and Printing
03-13-2012, 09:43 AM
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I find that LR's strength is more workflow oriented. It's an Adobe software, so it is possible to get similar results out of all the Adobe Software in terms of processing and even organizing.
The difference is in how you get those results. Lightroom targets the photographer as its user and tried to make its interface friendlier. Organization is fairly intuitive, and the development module is meant to do quick but quite effective editing of your photos in a simple workflow-based routine. The benefit is that you can actually quickly edit a whole photo shoot's worth of images assuming the images are all similar to begin with. Photoshop and Elements tend to be more image oriented where you'll be working one image at a time. I think you can do some mass operations, but it isn't as "simple", at least as far as the interface in LR makes it. The power in Photoshop and Elements is that you have access to editing tools such as layers, selective editing, masking, etc that is limited or non-existent in LR.
What works best ends up being a function of what you plan on doing. I am one of those that really doesn't like to spend a lot of time on the computer with images. I use Lightroom, and it works for me 95+% of the time. I can very quickly and effectively process my photos with only rare photos requiring more than a few minutes of work. Often, I'll spend 10-20 minutes on the first photo of a shoot and then use that as a preset for the remainder of the shoot. Only occasionally, do I wish to take the photo to Photoshop for editing that can't be done with LR alone. Most of the time, if I need that much work I dump the photo.
All the software tends to accept similar plugins, so if you end up liking software like Nik or noise removal programs, on-one brand, etc. they can all be worked in conjunction with LR, Photoshop, and Elements.
As someone mentioned, you'll have a hard time finding an all in one solution, but LR does a good job of balancing features without being over-complicated. That goes a long way.
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