Different Types of PhotoShop

[fotobydave]

Suppose you came home from a shoot with 500 photos and now you need to review and select the good ones. Sound familiar. Some of them are going to need a little touch on the darks or maybe you forgot to clean your sensor and their is that darn spot! Sound like fun? Get out LR and and import those photos ... fix the first one .. tools to help, then click a button and select all 500! Click another button and they are all lighter and the spot is gone! This is the type of work lightroom attacks. While it can do a lot on one photo, the abilitily to fix the little problems quickly and move on is its strong point. Got one shot that needs a lot of work, just click a couple of buttons and CSx is working on it ... then it files it back for lightroom. Of course it is useful to have lot's of memory for this.

[Sapanas]

I have a little input here I have been so lucky to have used cs3 cs4 and elements8 which is what I am using now my old comp that had cs4 on it crashed and lets just say i didnt have the cds for it any longer. But I have come up with a plan i am taking a college course in the spring and will be able to buy cs4 at a super discounted price. I do like the ease of elements but miss the elements in cs4!

I have also used Darkroom put out by express digital that is a great program for high volume not so much for high quility. Don't get me wrong there is plenty of quility but it is designed form a business perspective. I don't know if it handles raw or not.. We where processing thousands of photos a day and did it with ease in darkroom. great workflow manegment and sinc with just about any printer. I dont know if this helps any or not. In my opinion cs4 is the way to go. I have switched and only shoot in raw now and use a combo of elements and dpp i am just learning all the ends and out of dpp and really like what I have seen so far!

[Kristen]

I shoot raw+jpeg, though am considering just shooting raw since I have accumulated a lot of photos. When I edit I first use LR 2 and then if I need to I take the photo over to CS4, but for the most part LR does everything. Unless of course I need to remove blemishes, wrinkles, etc. I am so addicted to LR that before I take a photo I am already thinking about what it will look like in different presets, lol. I also do a lot of “texturing” to my photos which then I use CS4. I used corel psp for many years before converting to photoshop, it’s a great basic program that can do almost the same as photoshop for a lot cheaper.

[fotobydave]

So you just taken a couple hundred photos and need to take a look and select off a few to show, touch them up a bit and display them in some fashion. Which product would you use? CSx might take a couple days while LR is probably less than an hour. LR will easily pass the same change to 50 photos ... I am not sure about multiple changes, but this is so often a need when working a shoot. You shot 25 photos all at the same exposure and they are all a little light ... just darken the first and highlight the rest and boom .. all done. You can then go in and fix each a little different.

All changes are kept in the catalog and the original is never touched. Once you finish all your changes, you highlight the one's you want, point them to the output and save them in whatever format you need. For every output medium, you may want to vary the images ... prints, vs web shots vs monitor views ...

I've worked with Photoshop xxx .... don't know what to call since they bastardized the photoshop name ... for over 10 years and still can't get into it! Keep thinking the next version will be easier. So it sits, while I process everything with Lightroom.

[mdavis]

It's been a while since this thread was active, but wanted to put my alternate perspective on this.

It really depends on why you shoot. In my case, I may take dozens of photos of wildlife, for example, where you don't have as much time to compose and you want the best 'chance' shot of a quick-moving bird. Alternately, I may spend a lot of time composing a very few frames of a single, stationary scene as a landscape, perhaps shooting the same image over a period of time as clouds and lighting change a sunrise or sunset.

In both instances, I am looking for a single, best or most interesting image. I never shoot weddings (you guys trying to make a living don't need a free-lance amateur eating into your livelihood). So I open my hundreds of photos in Bridge, pick the frame(s) I want to work with and open them into ACR where I can maybe choose between 2 or 3 best possibilities. I tweak them in ACR and send them to Photoshop for final touchup, blemish repair, object removal (phone wires, road signs, etc.) and save the result as a Photoshop file with layers intact.

I have no need to pay $200 for Lightroom because as an amateur I never shoot or print dozens of photos shot with similar lighting as in wedding photography, nor do I need to create large numbers of proofs for client evaluation. My personal workflow is narrowed to only a few very select images, not batching everything on the CF card. So much of LR is aimed at high volume work and large numbers of photos for which it excels. That just isn't how I shoot, nor how I think about shooting.

Ansel Adams and indeed most of the old film photographers had limits on their equipment. 8x10 sheet film was expensive so they didn't shoot 50 shots at Yosemite hoping to get the best one. They took time, waited for the right light, composed, checked exposure carefully and took only a very few images. As an old timer who began in a B&W darkroom in the Army in 1968, I still treasure that philosophy of taking only what you think you can use. It rather like shooting a sniper rifle instead of an AR-15 that sprays rounds everywhere hoping to hit something. I like the discipline of slowing down and trying to make every shot count. That means different angles and hence different lighting on every frame. Such is not a strength for LR.

LR is for high volume pros who must shoot large numbers of photos to obtain a few keepers and need a 'quick and dirty' stab at large numbers of viewable proof images. Adobe is, of course, trying to make a case for everyone needing LR first, then PS later so they can sell both packages. But Bridge, included with PS, does most of what LR does in file handling and batch processing. It's rather interesting to see how Adobe tries to tease us into buying both products by isolating functions between them. For me, LR is redundant to Bridge and ACR. I try to make every shot a keeper, so I shoot very few frames most of the time, with the above-mentioned exceptions.

There is no right and wrong, of course. Just alternate perspectives. There is nothing I can do in LR that I can't do in Bridge, ACR and PS. There are many things I can do in Bridge, ACR and PS that I cannot do in LR. So if I buy LR, I still must buy PS. If I own PS, I don't 'need' LR. The only functional difference is in speed in dealing with large numbers which is why the pros buy it. I'm not a pro.