Touch up question concerning products.

Would Lightroom 3 have any advantages over Photoshop, GIMP, etc.?
I generally use Irfanview and GIMP for everything I do, even though I do have Photoshop ( I learned on GIMP, and therefore prefer it. ).
I have seen Lightroom mentioned a lot on this site, but have no knowledge of it, so does it do anything these other graphics programs don't? Just saw where Lightroom 3 is on sale, so my curiosity was roused.

barn9 wrote in post #13895684
Would Lightroom 3 have any advantages over Photoshop, GIMP, etc.?
I generally use Irfanview and GIMP for everything I do, even though I do have Photoshop ( I learned on GIMP, and therefore prefer it. ).
I have seen Lightroom mentioned a lot on this site, but have no knowledge of it, so does it do anything these other graphics programs don't? Just saw where Lightroom 3 is on sale, so my curiosity was roused.

lightroom is free to try for 30 days. go to adobe's website and download it to try. Lightroom 3 is not the same as PS or Gimp. Lightroom is a photo management and photo tweaking tool. Gimp and PS are more full blown editors or graphics manipulation. For a lot of photographers , all they need to do is to tweak their photos in post process. they can get 90-95% of all their PP done in lightroom. Ive used PS and LR. i prefer LR as i do not need to manipulate pixels and LR does a fine job managing my 30,000 photos. Besides photo management, I like how LR allows batch editing. I say try it out, and check out the tutorials on Adobe's site before buying it.

that is the conclusion I came to as well. I rarely ever use PS and mainly stick to LR3/4. They do what I need it to do on a photo. It depends on how technical and how you want to manipulate the photo at hand, how your workflow is and what the end goal and target is that you are trying to achieve.

I myself am not a fan of HDR or heavy manipulation of photos. I like some tweaks, but keeping the realism of the image at hand.

LR3/4 are excellent and well worth the money.. It never hurts to give the trial a shot as I have on LR4.