help me decide

I'm real new at this PP and I do have CS loaded on my computer and I have tried CS3 and LR on there trial offers. My question is which is more suited for me?

Now I'm not into making 3d stuff or doing a bunch of fancy editiing all I'm interested in is correcting my photos as close to as i saw them stuff like sharpen exposure comps and so forth, The fancy creative stuff can come later.

So of Light Room or PS3 which one should I get?

Thanks in advance if there is a thread on this I couldn't find it in the search function.

If all you are doing is basic image editing then lightroom should suffice for you. Along with this you get an excellent program to help you manage your photos.

Keeping in mind that you say that the creative stuff will come later, you are going to be paying anywhere from 200 to 300 for Lightroom and when you do decide that you want to get into that creative mode you are going to be spending for a full version of photoshop. I personally would not want to be without Photoshop as I tend to do alot of selections in my images and work with adjustments layers as well. Of course you can always go with something cheaper like Elements or the free program Gimp.

This is a hard question to answer for others besides yourself. Only you know how creative of a person you are. Most people just start with the basic editing but it doesn't take long with some people before they want to start and do more than this.

If you are new to PP then I highly suggest that you practice in DPP and ZoomBrowser before you venture into LightRoom and CS3. It will help you get an understanding of how RAW works. Starting off in CS3 can be very difficult because it is such a monster to learn.

I am not much of the creative type either and Lightroom does 95-99% of what I need on each photo. But I still use PS on every shot, even if all I do is a single pass of USM on an exported JPEG from LR. That being said you have PS CS so LR would be a great addition to your workflow. All non-creative (you can do some pretty creative stuff with LR BTW) or typical global edits would be done in LR and only major edits, as I prefer to call them, would be done in PS. IT works well for me. If I have a bunch of shots I like I process them in LR, export to jpeg for the web and do a little USM in PS. But for a shot for a contest or print for a wall I open it up in PS for more fine tuning

Most of my work is done in the Adobe Camera Raw section of CS3 and only occasionally do I venture into PS. But it is there when I need it.

FYI, you can get the full CS3 at www.academicsuperstore​.com at less than $300 if you have a child in school.

skanish wrote in post #3560446
If you are new to PP then I highly suggest that you practice in DPP and ZoomBrowser before you venture into LightRoom and CS3. It will help you get an understanding of how RAW works. Starting off in CS3 can be very difficult because it is such a monster to learn.

Ditto what skanish said. If you have not already, start with Canon's DPP since it is free. It works hand in hand with the CS you currently have. Likewise, LR works hand in hand with CS3. I don't think it's an apple-to-apple comparison between the two.
You didn't tell us what feature/function you really need in LR or CS3 that is missing from your CS.