Q. “I am a mom just looking to take better pictures of my boys, I would like to get a better editing program than Picasa but I am not sure what to get! Should I go with Photoshop Elements, Photoshop or Lightroom? What would you suggest for starting out?”
A. Well first I guess I’d tell you that the Photoshop programs are vastly different from Lightroom. In Photoshop, you open a photo, edit it and save. In LR, you import images into the program which means you can come and go, open and close the program, and your photos remain as you left them without the need to save. When you’re finished with them once and for all, you then export them out of Lightroom and into whatever folder you want to keep your edited photos in. Very important for us busy moms who don’t always get one session edited at once. Also, you can use LR to sort your photos, edit them, batch edit them and so much more. If you don’t have PS, you can edit your images entirely in LR without ever using another program. And if you want to work with layers {exe for textures}, you can just get Elements cheaply for that purpose. And don’t forget that if you’re a student, a teacher or you volunteer for a charitable organisation (like a church) and you might use the program to benefit the organisation, you can buy the programs from the Adobe Education store for a fraction of the price.
So if Lightroom is so great, why ever get Photoshop? Well, I moved to PS because I wanted to take advantage of the actions I was seeing from artists like Florabella, MCP Actions or Totally Rad. Also, I personally love the editing process to take as long as possible because it’s my favourite part of the photography process so I personally prefer Photoshop for editing, Lightroom for organising and a little colour or white balance correcting first.
