I Need Your Help in Choosing . . . Photo Editor

I Need Your Help in Choosing . . . Photo Editor

  • Aperture

    Votes: 1 3.8%

  • Photoshop Elements

    Votes: 3 11.5%

  • Adobe Lightroom

    Votes: 18 69.2%

  • Other

    Votes: 4 15.4%
  • Total voters
    26
casademurphy

casademurphy

New member
OK, so there are a bunch of photo editors out there for post processing. I need your help in choosing which one I should go with.

I'm not a professional photographer, but LOVE photography. I don't need a program that is SUPER hard core. Just one that has capabilities to remove unnecessary "items" from my photos. I hope that this makes sense.

I want you to vote because I'm trying out all of these programs with a 30-day trial and I don't want to have to learn them all in 30 days to make my decision. :)

Oh, and if you choose "other" in the poll, please post what you mean by other. Thanks in advance for your help.
 
My recommendation would be Lightroom AND Elements.

90% of what you need can be done in LR but it doesn't completely replace PS.
 
I am primarily a landscape photographer and I would say I am similar to Doug, I probably do 95% or more of my work in LR and for the occasional photo I do additional work in Photoshop CS4 (but everything could usually be done in Elements). Lightroom is so easy, it took about a day to get a good grasp on it by just playing around, but a year later I am still learning little things here and there to help refine things.
 
Most serious photographers use LR and PS side-by-side, some even using additional plugins like Noise Ninja, Mogrify, DXO, etc. but I think for the most part, Lighroom is all you need.
 
With TS's link, if you've got a kid in school that qualifies as well. ;)

A couple of really good online resources are lynda.com and photoshopuser.com

Both are subscription based, lynda month by month, NAPP is an annual membership. With NAPP you also get a monthly magazine and both have hundreds of online video tutorials.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15459216#post15459216 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by beerguy
With TS's link, if you've got a kid in school that qualifies as well. ;)

A couple of really good online resources are lynda.com and photoshopuser.com

Both are subscription based, lynda month by month, NAPP is an annual membership. With NAPP you also get a monthly magazine and both have hundreds of online video tutorials.
Click to expand...

Problem is, no kid either. :) Thanks for the links. I'll check them out.
 
Personally, if I am just going to be messing around with contrast, colors and what not I love Aperture 2.0! If I am actually going to be copying and pasting, or changing just part of the picture I would go with CS4. If you like HDR I would go with Photomatix. I like it better than CS4's HDR program...
But since you don't have that as an option I will go with Aperture...
 
Another happy Lightroom user here. It really speeds up your processing but I agree that ideally you'll want to have something like Elements or CS too.
 
I use Aperture 2, Photoshop (old school CS2), and Noise Ninja. It pretty much can do everything, but my skill level in no way takes advantage of its full capabilities.
 
One thing that hasn't been asked is... Do you have a Mac or PC? If you're on a Mac and all you're trying to do is simple brightness/contrast/crop/etc, you can do all these in Preview.app... you know, just to get your feet wet in post processing, so to speak.

Also if you have a newer Mac, you should already have iPhoto loaded. You could use that too.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15464713#post15464713 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by xtm
One thing that hasn't been asked is... Do you have a Mac or PC? If you're on a Mac and all you're trying to do is simple brightness/contrast/crop/etc, you can do all these in Preview.app... you know, just to get your feet wet in post processing, so to speak.

Also if you have a newer Mac, you should already have iPhoto loaded. You could use that too.
Click to expand...

I have a Mac. I have iPhoto, but I don't know if I like how it catalogs the photos. I'm trying to get a little more into post processing, so I'm thinking that Lightroom is working out the best for what I'm looking for.

I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm thinking that once I get Lightroom down, I will probably add Elements to the mix.
 
Newer version of iPhoto is supposed to have "facial recognition" in it. When you tag and catalog around 20 photos of person a, it will start to automatically catalog new photos of that person.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15465905#post15465905 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by vbjimmie
Newer version of iPhoto is supposed to have "facial recognition" in it. When you tag and catalog around 20 photos of person a, it will start to automatically catalog new photos of that person.
Click to expand...

It does, but it doesn't impress me much.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15465905#post15465905 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by vbjimmie
Newer version of iPhoto is supposed to have "facial recognition" in it. When you tag and catalog around 20 photos of person a, it will start to automatically catalog new photos of that person.
Click to expand...

I don't know if this has changed with the newest version, but with older versions of iPhoto, the changes are not non-destructive (nice double negative), so the changes you make in iPhoto change the original. I'm not a fan of that.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=15467404#post15467404 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Wolverine
I don't know if this has changed with the newest version, but with older versions of iPhoto, the changes are not non-destructive (nice double negative), so the changes you make in iPhoto change the original. I'm not a fan of that.
Click to expand...


Sort of.

If you import RAW files, iPhoto generates a JPG of the file at import. Any change that you make is against that JPG file so they are destructive to that file but your RAW is never modified.
 
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