Purchasing Photoshop CC question?

I used to use photoshop exclusively for photo editing. I can't imagine there is anything in LR that can't be done in PS, or PSP for that matter. If I had been using PSP for 12 years, I'm not sure I'd bother with PS - unless I really needed to see what was on the other side.

Just editing photos.
I can do alot with PSP, it has your general editing and Layers and many other things I know nothing about.

Watching the LR video.... looks about like PSP 2019 as far as adjustments. Different layout.

I guess my thing is I just assumed Photoshop was/is what people use to edit photos, not LR.

I think LR makes photo "developing" functions a lot easier than the pixel editor programs. I've never used LR, so I can't compare.

To help OP with conceptual understanding, there are some fundamental groups of tasks in dealing with what your camera stores...

1. Some exposure/contrast adjustments, etc. and conversion of RAW files to JPG/TIFF
   
2. Editing images at the pixel level of detail
   
3. Creating/editing 'graphics' (drawing elements which do not comprise a photo)
   
4. Managing data via 'smart retrieval' of keywords/labels (e.g. Paris, sports, teen) or certain photo characteristics (e.g. 100mm FL, or 5DIV), and retrieving 'collections', and showing slide shows of the groupings.
   

• Photoshop originally was #2 and #3 only, then evolved to add #1 via ACR, and some very basic parts of #4
  
• Photoshop Elements originally was #2 and #3 only, then evolved to add #1 a bit less powerful than Photoshop/Lightroom
  
• Paintshop Pro originally was #2 and #3 only, then evolve to add #1 a bit less powerful than Photoshop/Lightroom
  
• Lightroom started with #1 + #2 + #3 + #4, and simple evolved from there
  

That helps, thanks.

Sounds like I Need LR if its directed specifically to photo editing. I do fine with what I have, I'm just getting a little more technical and I'm trying to learn how to edit properly and also efficiently.
My one big thing is, I go out and have a photo "session" with my daughter and come home with 100 pics to edit. So I sit and individually edit them adjusting basically the same settings. I would like a program that will batch edit and then I can find tune them as needed. I'm not sure PSP does that

Although over the years I have had a few complementary versions of Photoshop (e.g. 'Photoshop LE') presented to me with hardware products like scanners or printers, and although I have used them, and although I also have tried complemetary versions of Elements, early on I chose to use Paintshop Pro because it could do pretty much all that I needed, at a less challenging-to-wallet price than Photoshop. I never have had motivation to switch to the other side. Adobe monthly fees further drive me away from any desire to switch, since I earn no money but have only hobbyist/enthusiast expenses with zero income to write off expenses against.

In switching from JPG storage to RAW storage, I tried RawShooter, and Elements RAW conversion and Paintshop Pro RAW conversion, I found neither Elements nor Paintshop Pro had RAW editing quite as wide in flexibility as RawShooter. When Adobe bought the code for RawShooter and integrated it to create Lightroom, I found the added capability of Digital Asset Management to be a very powerful way to handle large collections of images with arbitrary groupings, a very useful capability especially for a professional.

Then, with LR7 monthly licensing just like Photoshop, Adobe is falling out of favor with me in general, and changing to another non-Adobe RAW convertor is a consideration since I have found that DAM is not so strongly motivating me as a hobbyist. Lose another loyal customer, airheads! Photographers are not all pros who earn income and can write off monthly expenses.

Wilt wrote in post #18694435
To help OP with conceptual understanding, there are some fundamental groups of tasks in dealing with what your camera stores..

Now I feel like I'm missing out by never trying LR...

Great educational reply

reefvilla wrote in post #18694436
My one big thing is, I go out and have a photo "session" with my daughter and come home with 100 pics to edit. So I sit and individually edit them adjusting basically the same settings. I would like a program that will batch edit and then I can find tune them as needed. I'm not sure PSP does that

Lightroom makes that oh so easy with the combination of Presets, plus 'Synch' tool

samueli wrote in post #18694443
Now I feel like I'm missing out by never trying LR...

Great educational reply

Too bad Adobe has adopted its perpetual expense model for licensing for any users. 24 years as a hobbyist equates to close to $4900 in smaller bank account when going with Adobe, when factoring in a mere 4% annual return 'loss'. Pros can justify what hobbyists cannot.

Twenty-something hobbyists should stop and think about 45 years of expense and lost interest due to the expense.
"It's only $10" is too simplistic way of looking at what Adobe is asking you to do.

(hint: it is in excess of $19k, less money in your bank account after 50 years)

So what is the dumber down version of LR... elements?
And is it a stand alone or also a monthly fee?

LR is a catalogue bases system. This is not effect your original RAW files. I can make edits using LR and then edit those same files using a different software and it won't effect LR's edits. My RAW files are on an external drive and is about 1T B full. The catalogue of all those is on my HD and is only 76MB.

You can create collections, groups, keyword files so you can easily find them which is what you are looking for. So it is a basic editor, you can apply hundreds of free presets to get the look you want.

Here is a shot taken in 2012. On the left is the column showing the adjustments I made. That is not all of it. There is more when you scroll down.

Also you have a 6D2. It was released before 2018 so LR6 perpetual license is still available for now. If you get a camera that was released in 2018 and on won't be supported but you can convert to DNG.

Some info about collections.

https://www.youtube.co​m …1PNyRW38UnE&fra​gs=pl%2Cwn

digital paradise wrote in post #18694467
Also you have a 6D2. It was released before 2018 so LR6 perpetual license is still available for now. If you get a camera that was released in 2018 and on won't be supported but you can convert to DNG.

Some info about collections.

https://www.youtube.co​m …1PNyRW38UnE&fra​gs=pl%2Cwn

"While you may continue to purchase and use Lightroom 6 with a perpetual license, Adobe will no longer provide updates to the software. "

So am I better off going with the CC version in the long run?

Wilt wrote in post #18694383
Nice to learn that photo file storage is not via the Cloud!

It depends which version you use, the new CC pretty much requires the use of the "cloud", while with CCC/Lr7 it's optional. I do use the optional cloud storage with Lr7, along with my Android phablet which runs the Android version of Lr CC. When moving from Lr7 to the mobile app it just uses smart previews, and only uploads images in Collections that I have designated as shared. I can also import images that I have taken with the phone and import them into Lr CC on the phone, or they are auto imported if I take the photo from within Lr CC. The images imported to Lr CC in this way are then imported to my Lr7 install automatically, with the images being added to folders in accordance with my standard folder structure within Lr. This is much simpler than having Lr watch say a Dropbox folder, since you don't have the restriction of having to empty the watched folder if you want to watch different folders at different times.

reefvilla wrote in post #18694403
I use Paint Shop Pro at the moment. I was just wanting to get Photoshop to see how different it was and if I liked it better. So, I have no clue about Lightroom?!? So if it is a photo editor, maybe that's what I should be comparing to PSP?
I've used PSP for the last 12 years so I really dont know what else is out there or what would help me edit better/faster

samueli wrote in post #18694420
I used to use photoshop exclusively for photo editing. I can't imagine there is anything in LR that can't be done in PS, or PSP for that matter. If I had been using PSP for 12 years, I'm not sure I'd bother with PS - unless I really needed to see what was on the other side.

Reefvilla Ps also includes a file manager program, which is a comprehensive program designed for those that use a variety of Adobe file formats, along with image and other media types. One of the things it does is allow you to access in easy to read ways the Exif data in images, as well as to add keywords colour labels and other metadata to the files. If you shoot RAW then although you open the image to Ps it is initially opened in Adobe Camera Raw, which is an extension to Ps with a completely separate interface, so it looks like a different program. If you shoot in RAW and do the majority of your image processing in ACR, rather than the main Ps program then Lr may be of use to you. Once in the main Ps window it is very like PSP in the way that it works. Well it was when I was using PSP, back when Ps was at version 4, and I don't expect that will have changed much over the years. I'm sure PSP will have kept feature parity with Ps pretty much.

Now why would you want to use Lr? Lr is a fully featured image management system built around a fully relational database. This gives it hugely powerful ways to sort and manage your images. It also incorporates the full power of the ACR RAW processing engine, although in a different looking interface, with a couple of added tools. To this are added several output modules that allow easy direct printing, IMO much better than printing from within Ps has ever been, along with Book, Slideshow, and Web gallery output modules. Of these I have only used the web gallery option, and that was quite some years ago, but it was pretty good code that was produced. It also has a relatively simple export option, in which it is very easy to produce customisable presets. The one thing that a lot of people find difficult about Lr is that you have to "import" images into it. Also once imported it is a really bad idea to move images on disk from outside of Lr. This is because you have to tell Lr where to find the original file of each of the images in the catalogue.

It is the catalogue system that makes Lr what it is. If you are a working pro photographer that simply does things like weddings, where you may only do one shoot for each client, you may not need sophisticated image management, you can stick them in a folder, and if the client comes back at some later date for more copies, they won't be too hard to find. For others though you may have far more complex image management requirements. When you have lots of different types of images, or images of similar subjects that have to be sub sorted into smaller groups Lr is great. Lr allows you to sort images by all of the data recorded in Exif by the camera, as well as metadata you might add, such as keywords etc, all the stuff that Bridge also lets you add by the way. AS well as a folder tree Lr also lets you create collections, you can have collections of collections too. The collections come as normal and smart. Smart collections allow you to build up a complex search criteria that is applied to all the images in the catalogue. You can add just about every possible bit of metadata to a smart collection definition that I can think of. The great thing is that a single image can be in more than one collection, normal or smart, at the same time. This solves the age old question when using folders to store images of where do I put my image when it fits into many different categories.

What the database adds to this is speed. Bridge now also has smart collections. I pointed Bridge at my main folder layout with just under 50K images in it, to compare to the results of using Lr. I created the same set of smart collection parameters in both and selected them. It took Lr less than a second to find all the required images and start showing me thumbnails. In Bridge I stopped it after nearly 36 hours as it hadn't finished searching. The problem that Bridge, or any on DB based system has is that it has to physically open and read the metadata that is required for the search from every single file! Not a trivial process when there are approaching 50K images. My catalogue is now heading towards the 70K image mark. Using a folder based system to manage your photos really only works while you are able to remember when and where you took every photo, and for me that was quite a few almost 10K in fact. My main interest is Aviation, but when you have photos from half a dozen airshows at the same location, many featuring the same aircraft types, remembering which one exactly get hard, especially when there are several hundred different types to manage. Also I might just be interested in one type, not it's location. In under a minute I can have Lr select me all the images of an aircraft type, shot on a particular camera, with a particular lens, at a set focal length for a zoom, aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Most of that time will be spent picking the required keywords and other metadata from drop down lists, or typing it in.

If you need the image management, but also use Ps a lot then that is OK too, since Lr makes it very simple to round trip your images from Lr to Ps, or for that matter any other external editor, including other RAW editors. I added DXO 11 to my system when it was given away, and an edit in short cut was automatically added to my Lr install. It's often the same when you add new editing software on a computer with Lr installed. Or you can manually create your own edit in commands.to add to the context sensitive right click.

Alan

Wow, thanks for taking the time to write all that.
I really think LR might be good for me And my wife, she does Yearly books of my daughter, all holidays and special events and then has them printed. She spends hours searching for photos because I usually load them all in a bulk folder with my daughter's name.