Lightroom3

I currently have Adobe Elements 9 on my computer and I am wondering if I would need lightroom? There was a trial disc of lightroom 3 which come with the Elements bundle, but I haven't loaded it into my computer yet.
What does lightroom 3 do that Elements does not?

Lightroom and Elements actually would compliment each other rather than replace one. I started with Elements, moved to photoshop and now do most of my post processing solely in Lightroom.

Lightroom is a great image organizer and photo adjustment tool. It has some powerful batch processing options and can really shorten the time it takes to tweak various setting on large numbers of images. Elements is a photo editor. Though there is overlap, Elements can do many more things to the actual image itself other than adjusting image settings.

gjl711 wrote in post #12074171
Lightroom is a great image organizer and photo adjustment tool. It has some powerful batch processing options and can really shorten the time it takes to tweak various setting on large numbers of images. Elements is a photo editor. Though there is overlap, Elements can do many more things to the actual image itself other than adjusting image settings.

I have heard from a friend of mine about the organizer that Lightroom has to offer. Up until now I have always stored my photos in various folders on an external hard drive. To some people it would be confusing to find a certain photo, I guess I am just gonna have to run this disk and see what it is all about.
If so many other people are using Lightroom I guess it can't be a bad thing right?

hb96tuner wrote in post #12074241
I have heard from a friend of mine about the organizer that Lightroom has to offer. Up until now I have always stored my photos in various folders on an external hard drive. To some people it would be confusing to find a certain photo, I guess I am just gonna have to run this disk and see what it is all about.
If so many other people are using Lightroom I guess it can't be a bad thing right?

Heh! Naw, Lightroom is a good thing!

Elements and the standard Photoshop came long before Lightroom made its introduction. Lightroom was introduced by the Adobe people as an app that took the Raw processor from Photoshop and "wrapped it" with nice organizational and output tools so that many photographers who shot Raw and wanted to simply combine the "digital darkroom" with these other tools but didn't need the more advanced image editing tools of Elements/Photoshop would have a good "workflow central" to work from. In time Lightroom included jpegs as well as tiffs and psd files, and has become popular with a whole lot of shooters who prefer this workflow.

But we pretty much all need occasionally an image editor such as Elements or Photoshop (or Gimp or whatever) so we can go from Lightroom to more "serious" stuff. So, don't neglect Elements -- learn it well, and if you want to try Lightroom you can still do great stuff with Elements!

hb96tuner wrote in post #12074241
I have heard from a friend of mine about the organizer that Lightroom has to offer. Up until now I have always stored my photos in various folders on an external hard drive. To some people it would be confusing to find a certain photo, I guess I am just gonna have to run this disk and see what it is all about.
If so many other people are using Lightroom I guess it can't be a bad thing right?

Lightroom is a great thing in my opinion. What tonylong has said in his description of Lightroom (LR) is pretty spot on. I am like you, I used Elements for about 4 years going from Version 4 to V. 6 and finally to V. 8. I had a trial run of LR when the Beta version of LR 3 was around that didn't cost anything to download and run. The Library module of LR just blew me away. It has so many different and handy ways of organizing your images that I am still learning some of the finer points of this aspect of the Library module. In my opinion, the Library module is like the Elements Organizer on steroids - it is a data asset management application with a lot of the capabilities of Windows Explorer built in so that you can manage all of your images from within LR, as well as the files and folders they are in... If you are relying on your own ability to find images amongst a sea of folders on your hard-drive, then good luck with this when you have a few thousand images to manage...(don't mean to be flippant here, just realistic). I know of professionals who are managing collections of over 200K images using the LR Library module.

The Develop module does about 90% of the developing that I need to do for editing and preparing my images for printing - all my printing is done through the Print module... I have CS5 and I find I only use it when I need to do pixel level editing, or use some of the special actions it has like making panoramas, or some limited HDR. The interface between LR and CS5 and presumably Elements (I don't know because I don't use it, but it is there) is great and it is very easy to go between the two applications. As well, I have a few plug-ins and the interface between them and LR is also quite easy to use - all these applications are 64 bit applications, running under Win 7 - 64 bit.

The one downside to using Elements with LR is that you have to use the 32 bit version of LR, as the 64 bit version will not interface with Elements. It does interface with CS5, in fact right now, Adobe have a special deal for Elements owners (not sure which version you need to have) where you can buy CS5 for about $300, so if you liked LR and wanted to have CS5 to go with the 64 bit version of LR then you could take advantage of this offer (limited time though). Your knowledge and understanding of Elements will go a long way to getting you going in CS5.

I wasn't aware that LR came on the Elements disc, but you can always download the latest version (currently 3.3 but soon to be 3.4) from the Adobe site and use it for 30 days before you have to buy it. As well, LR will convert your Elements catalog to a LR catalog if you wish to move to LR.

I guess by now you have figured out that I am pretty enthused about LR - yup - you bet. So, give it a try and if you have any questions, post back and I am sure you will get a response. If you decide that LR is the way to go, then I would suggest you get a copy of Scott Kelby's book on LR3, download the trial images and work your way through the examples in his book. It doesn't cover all the finer points, but it will definitely get you started.

Cheers,

WesternGuy