Photoshop or Lightroom for Student?

Hey everyone, I'm looking to buy my first post processing software. All I've used so far is what little there is on flickr, and Gimp, although Gimp is extremely hard to understand and get good results. But that's probably just my stupid self

I'm wanting to get good software, and since I'm a college student, I can get either Lightroom or Photoshop CS6 for the discount price.

Should I go ahead and get CS6 since its so cheap for me right now or should I go with LR 4? Most of all, I just want something that's easy to use which is making me lean toward Lightroom, but I wanted your opinion on the matter.

Thanks,
Tyler

Two very different programs. Lightroom is a image organizer and level adjuster. It can do a lot but it is not an image editor. You are limited to cataloging your pictures and adjusting quite a variety of things many locally and some globally.

PS is a full blown image editor and you can do pretty much all the same things a LR but you also have bit level control of the images, ability to combine images, ability to remove elements from an image. What it doesn't do well is organize your images.

I'm a big Lightroom fan, so I am biased. I say Lightroom and maybe pick up Photoshop Elements for those times when you need to clone something large, add a texture, etc.

So with LR & Elements, what would I be missing from photoshop? I won't need to do any sort of graphic design. Should those be sufficient?

Apparantly amazon doesn't sell the regular cs6 in a student package, I would have to get CS6 Extended.
Same thing with Elements. I have to get Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements.

Pretty confusing how many programs there are

Tiller wrote in post #15665398
So with LR & Elements, what would I be missing from photoshop?

http://www.adobe.com …e-version-comparison.html

For editing your photos, my advice tends to be to start out with Elements, and really learn it.

But the student discounts do make CS look attractive. The one issue is that getting the "CS6 Extended Package" leaves you "stuck" with that package for future upgrades. However, I'm not a student and so I don't know what the "real world effect" of this is. Hopefully some with experience can chime in!

Comparing Elements to the "standard" Photoshop CSx is worth doing. Elements has a ton of useful tools, and is likely all you will need in an "image editor". Where it "falls short" of the full-bore Photoshop, at least in my experience, is 1) Elements has a very trimmed-down Raw processor, which when I was using Elements meant a lot to me because I was preparing to get my first DSLR and to shoot Raw with it, and 2) Elements is (or at least was) limited in its ability to do things like automating processes and batch processing groups of shots. I'm not sure what has been upgraded over the years, but still "by nature" Elements will be "downsized" compared to the "standard" Photoshop, and since back in "the day" I was increasing my "volume" of photography, well, I decided to make the leap to the "standard" Photoshop (back then it was CS2).

And then there was Lightroom. I was happily going on with Photoshop CS2, but, like many of us, my growing volume of photos began to "pile up" on me, so that the issue of Digital Asset Management (DAM) became a real concern to me. Well, during that time reports were circulating about an upcoming Adobe product that would "package" DAM tools with the state-of-the-art Raw processor found in the Camera Raw processor used in PS CSx, not the "trimmed down" version found in Elements. All this stuff was to be integrated in a Raw Workflow Application, one that was being dedigned to be an "all-in-one" solution for most of what photographers wanted/needed to do.

This sounded great, I was "serious" about the DAM thing and also was seriously shooting Raw, so I grabbed the Lightroom Beta. It was "buggy", so I stuck with using CS2 as my "maing" tool, but over time, the Lightroom team did a lot of work to fix bugs. I had upgraded Photoshop to CS3, but after a couple Lightroom upgrades, good reports were coming out about the latest, plus they added support for jpegs, tiffs and psds, all good stuff, and so I jumped on board!

The thing I hope you "take away" from this is that dang DAM thing -- Lightroom takes organization "seriously"! There are plenty of options, you can pick and choose how you go about things, but right at the beginning, when you "Import" images into Lightroom, you want to choose your options wisely, otherwise you will likely regret it!

All that being said, my advice would be to first consider Elements compared to CS6, choose which will best meet your photo editing needs, commit to learning the program you choose. And, as you go, sure, "read up" on Lightroom, especially that DAM thing, so that if you do go with Lightroom, you will have a good combined "package" for DAM, a very capable Raw processor, and an image editor that will meet your more "extensive" editing needs!
As to Lightroom

Get the 30-day trials from Adobe. This should give you pretty good idea what you want.

Seems to me LR is what you want. It's very intuitive, pretty fast, all-in-one package. The learning curve for CS6 is pretty steep. It can do everything you want and then some. LR and CS6 are fairly well integrated so you could buy LR now, and CS6 later if you think you need it.

These two complement each other not replace.
Nevertheless you are better of to learn PS in detail no matter what.
Also listen to good advice above for use of trial and then as student there are many good deals that you need to look for when deciding to buy.

LR does 99% of what I need it to so, but there is that 1% when I need PS and it comes in very handy having both.

I think the biggest question that no one asked, at least that I saw, was what do you want to do with / to you pictures? Do you want to correct things like white balance, crop, punch up the saturation or down, create B&W pictures, in general just make them look good, or do you want to take one person's head out and put someone else's head in. Or merge two images together, create designs and add text to the image? If you are looking for the former, then LR is all you need. If you are looking to do the later, then PS is a must. It really all just depends what you are wanting to do with your images.

I definitely want to do the first bit, but I might like that second part to make HDR photos. Can LR do HDR?

Tiller wrote in post #15666622
I definitely want to do the first bit, but I might like that second part to make HDR photos. Can LR do HDR?

No. LR is not an editor and cannot handle layers or multiple images combined into one.

tonylong wrote in post #15665605
For editing your photos, my advice tends to be to start out with Elements, and really learn it.

^^^^^
Tony has it right.
I've seen some people who have REALLY mastered the tools in PSE do incredible stuff. Later, when they move up to CS, they are light years ahead of others who start out with CS and get overwhelmed by the tools sets.

Tiller wrote in post #15666622
I definitely want to do the first bit, but I might like that second part to make HDR photos. Can LR do HDR?

If you're interested in HDR, then check out Photomatix with Tonemapping. It's much better for HDR than Photoshop IMO.

I would definitely choose Lightroom over Photoshop, but I don't fully understand your needs.