Is Lightroom 4 enough?

Is Lightroom 4 enough for photo editing? Or would I see a bunch of added benefits from using Photoshop Elements 10 in addition to LR4? I also have Piexlmator 2, but I haven't really messed with it much. I feel like post processing is the weakest part of my photography right now. Any opinions are appreciated.

You'll get a lot of "it depends" answers....

Here's mine: It depends what you want to achieve with your editing. Lightroom can deal very well with global adjustments. If you want to mop out the trash can in your otherwise perfect landscape picture, then there is no way around PS.
I do 99% of all adjustments in LR.

You could try and get by with Lightroom and GIMP... I'd take Lightroom as my only editor before I went back to PS as my only editor, but that's a preference...

What drmaxx said.
Personally, I go to a second editor in only three cases; big clones, difficult perspective distortion corrections and difficult masks. LR will do all these things, but not well and not easily. I once cloned out several electricity cables and a pole in LR, just to see if I could. I succeeded but I won't do it again.
But small spot healing/cloning, moderate distortion corrections and not-delicate masks LR does very well, so the occasions when LR isn't enough are rare.

There are just some tasks Lightroom cannot do.

If you want to engage in any type of cloning, then Lightroom has no function for that.

It also only has very basic spot removal.

IMO, Lightroom is not enough by itself.

Look at the new Creative Cloud licensing for CS6, very cost effective IMO.

Interestingly, Lightroom has not advanced the "Cloning Tool" beyond simple Spot Removal!

It is quite effective with spot removal, and, in fact, you can adjust the Size of the tool to get rid of some larger "spots", but the fact is that it will not be a match for your Cloning Brush that you find in Elements when dealing with complex cloning problems.

That in itself is a good reason to have Elements alongside of Lightroom but there are other features in Elements that also go beyond the capabilities of Lightroom. Lightroom was built around a Raw processor, not a graphics processor, and so their approach to many things is different from what you would see in a good/basic image editor.

Thanks for the replies. It sounds like I probably just need to spend more time in LR and learn some better processing techniques.

whmeltonjr wrote in post #14765913
Is Lightroom 4 enough for photo editing? Or would I see a bunch of added benefits from using Photoshop Elements 10 in addition to LR4? I also have Piexlmator 2, but I haven't really messed with it much. I feel like post processing is the weakest part of my photography right now. Any opinions are appreciated.

You already have Pixelmator which is far far more powerful than Elements 10, for image manipulation your not going to find much better than Pixelmator , even at £600 CS6 is not really going to do huge amounts more for image manipulation.

LR4 for cataloguing and editing, Pixelmator for image manipulation, and your sorted, but seeing as you on a mac my choice would be Aperture and Pixelmator

I'll have to look into Aperture. I've heard about it, but have no experience with it.

you should mention what you use it for currently.

lightroom work (extensive/ not HDR) -though this is from when i first started photography and should go back and re-edit.

I do street, some landscapes, and some family candid type things. Just a hobby for me. I do want something to better process HDR on my Mac.

lr4 is more than enough for you, it's more than most people know what to do with actually.

local adjustment brush on their is amazing, especially after the lr3/lr4 update.

although if your landscape photography is more advance and you shoot with multiple exposures, you definitely need PS

whmeltonjr wrote in post #14770899
I do street, some landscapes, and some family candid type things. Just a hobby for me. I do want something to better process HDR on my Mac.

HDR is a whole other question.

Lightroom doesn't "do" HDR in the sense that it can't combine multiple files/images and either blend them or do "tonemapping" on them, resulting in one image that "brings out" a Dynamic Range that wasn't present on a single capture. For this you need either special HDR software that takes the several exposures and "tonemaps" them into one image, or software that brings the exposures into layers that you can "blend" by selectively applying portions from each layer into a final product. Lightroom does neither of these things. You can do both these things in Photoshop, or you can use other apps, and then Lightroom can deal with the "final product" to do final processing.

What Lightroom (and other Raw processors) does enable when working with Raw files is the ability to bring out the maximun dynamic range captured in one image, which is often more that what would result from an out-of-camera jpeg.

whmeltonjr wrote in post #14765913
Is Lightroom 4 enough for photo editing? Or would I see a bunch of added benefits from using Photoshop Elements 10 in addition to LR4? I also have Piexlmator 2, but I haven't really messed with it much. I feel like post processing is the weakest part of my photography right now. Any opinions are appreciated.

Adding PS Elements isn't going to really do much for you. Full blown PS perhaps, but you can do a ton in Lightroom and I honestly don't really take any portraits into PS anymore. I just use lightroom. I do use PS for landscapes where I do a lot more processing - dodging/burning, B&W, etc.