Is Lightroom 4 enough?

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.

It all depends what you are trying to achieve. What type of photography do you do and would you like to share some of your work with us on here?

Lightroom 4 and Elements should give you all you need. You should be able to do most everything in Lightroom, including dodging and burning, etc. You can expand its capabilities by installing plugins that will improve its sharpening, noise reduction and add HDR capabilities. Elements will be useful for cloning, working with Layers or masking or for switching heads.

Elements now has about 90% of what Photoshop CS has with respect to photo processing. Photoshop CS is bloated with stuff that only ad folks need. You'll get by just fine with that combo. I use Elements along with Aperture and don't miss having Photoshop CS at all.

tonylong wrote in post #14772615
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.

This is what I love about LR4. The ability to pull back highlights and boost the shadows with the new process sliders. It even seems to be able to work wonders on some of my older pictures, that were shot JPG, when I only had a 1Gb card and needed to take a lot of exposures. On many of my aviation pictures, which of course are heavily backlit, I actually end up with Highlight at -100% and shadows at +100% when exposing to the right; so that although the shadows are boosted they are still pulled from the zeroed exposure settings.

Moving from CS3 to LR4.1 was like finding that I actually had a new camera when working with my old 300D files. The new ACR version is really worth the upgrade, especially if you have an older camera like I do. Someone said that CS5 to CS6 wasn't that good an upgrade for features, and if you use LR4 as well that may be true. But if you use Bridge/ACR/PS then ACR 7 in CS6 is worth the upgrade all on it's own.
Personally I find LR4 and CS3 to work OK for me, although maybe Content Aware could be a useful upgrade, I have never tried it so don't know how useful it is. I would probably say that LR4 coupled with the Elements editor would be all that most keen photographers would need. Of course Elements has many of the library elements and an interface to it that is very similar to LR's, although they seem to be a feature that is not really talked about much, at least not on POTN

Alan

I had used the Elements Organizer back when Elements was, well, what I was using.

In time I decided I wanted features from the full Photoshop such as Actions and batch processing, so I moved to PS CS2. Photoshop CSx didn't have an "Organizer" interface like Elements/Lightroom, although you could do basic things such as keywording.

But then, Lightroom came out and got stable (I was then to CS3) and once that happened, I jumped on it and was quite happy with the organizational Library interface and features, and haven't looked back! I am also still with CS3...sure, some of the new features in CS6 sound nice, but since my workflow is almost entirely in Lightroom, well, I don't fuss about what I don't have!!!

tonylong wrote in post #14768013
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.

This is one of the big reasons I still prefer PS, apart from layer masks, is the spot healing brush with content aware. It's a really amazing tool. LR is a great for processing RAW and a great way to start your workflow as far as indexing and for many people, it has just about everything they need. If you have a MAC, Pixelmator is awesome.

Depends on your needs. LR is great for:
- File management (import, create virtual copies, etc)
- All your basic adjustments (Color, crop, lens profile correction, spot healing, etc etc)
- Batch exporting files

If you need: layers, masks, cloning or removing elements, etc etc you will need something like PS.
And my tip always is: If you start with a new software package, take a quick course with tutorials to get up to speed. Lynda.com has some fantastic startup tutorials for lightroom to get you up to speed (basically hand you a fantastic workflow).