Adobe Elements or Photoshop CS5

Hi,

Looking at purchasing a software package for post processing.


Whats the main difference between them and what do you guys use?


There is a big price difference but is the extra $$$$$$ worth it for just cleaning up photos and jazzing them up a bit?

Nearly forgot to mention, I want to edit my RAW images as I am shooting in RAW

Ian

For someone getting started out in a "normal" photographic workflow, Elements is good to get you going.

For shooting Raw, you might consider also installing the Raw processing software that came with your camera, Digital Photo Professional (DPP) and having the latest updates from the Canon site. It give quite good conversions and when you need the capabilities of a program like Elements you can convert to a tiff in DPP and open it in Photoshop.

As you've seen, the "full bore" version of Photoshop is expensive -- it has more tools and is geared towards a "high-power" workflow that enables a lot of automation and such. For most people, it can have too many features and be overkill, so Elements is a good place to start as you learn your way.

Thanks for the reply Tony.


I might download the free demo from Adobe and give Elements a go.

snapshot2011 wrote in post #12381253
Thanks for the reply Tony.

I might download the free demo from Adobe and give Elements a go.

That's a great thing to do!

I believe that along with Elements comes ACR, Adobe Camera Raw. This is a really nice RAW editor with a built in gateway to Elements for finish work. I've only been shooting an processing for a couple of years, but even Elements is robust enough to do great edits.

Another reasonably priced option is Lightroom 3. Many at POTN use it. They all swear by it!

dave

I have an old version of Photoshop but for an amateur who only rarely does detailed editing with layers or pixel manipulation etc. it is overkill. I really like Lightroom as it is geared to allow batch tagging, organizing and processing of multiple images fairly quickly doing the sort of edits I like to do: e.g. adjust the WB, the exposure if off, contrast or levels, bump vibrance, crop and level, do some noise removal and sharpening. I think a combination of Lightroom and Elements would be great for most amateur and many professional photographers. An advantage of this route is the update price is much less over time as well (eg if you get a new camera not supported by an older version).

tonylong wrote in post #12381139
For someone getting started out in a "normal" photographic workflow, Elements is good to get you going.

Totally agree. You should be good to go with PSE & DPP.

Unless you want to venture into serious image manipulation and graphics art, as a photographer you really shouldn't need the full blown Photoshop CS*. At most you should only really need Lightroom, but for many people DPP and Elements is plenty.