Cs4 or lightroom

I currently own ps7. I want to upgrade. I have dialup internet service due to our location. A trial of lightroom is out of the question. What do you think? Cs5(6) or lightroom? Do you know of any past disscusions comparing the features of the two programs?

I use both...

LIghtroom as my organizer and lil tweaks.

Cs4 for refine tuning...

I would say it depends somewhat on your workflow. Do you do any amount of significant editing on the image that could not be done by Lightroom. Do you want to start to keyword and catalog your images, if so then Lightroom is an ok choice. If all you want is a RAW converter and an editor then I would go with CS4 or wait for the next release of it which is just around the corner. You do get Adobe's camera raw with this and it uses the same RAW engine as Lightroom. You can do keywording in Bridge which ships with all versions of Photoshop but but it is very basic.

Personally, I doubt that I will move to Lightroom 3 but am sure that I will get the next photoshop version. It fits better to the kind of things that I do. You are really the only one that knows what sort of things that you do and which product will best fit that.

I have both... I don't like bridge, and CS4 is a bit too technical for editing for me... so i always use lightroom first to edit, crop, align etc the picture then export to CS4 to add boarders and watermarks.

if i can do the boarders and watermarks in lightroom then i really don't have much need for CS4 except if i want fancy effects like isolation, fake tilt shift etc...

Your best bet would be to get Lightroom, if you can't get both right now. You can do the most to your images in Lightroom. Lightroom is excellent for making your pictures look better and easier to learn. Photoshop is very advanced and I only use it for making major modifications to my shots now. (And I've used Photoshop for almost 10 years now.)

Well, I'll still Photoshop 7. Is it more advanced than lightroom? Or could I still make more complicated edits in ps7?

PS is a different animal than LR. LR is an excellent program to organize photos and allows you to effectively batch process photos at once - you just make edits and then export them at a time of your choosing, with specific presets depending on what you need. I use LR2 almost entirely now and only open up CS when I need to do more complicated things like make covers.

I've vote to go to LR first.

Adorama has a bundle price right now, but there are so many different prices. I don't understand?

I only use CS4.

I trialled LR2 and threw it away. Why? Because I dont shoot professionaly and dont have thousands of images that I need to catalogue. I still needed an editing programme and CS4 shipped with bridge (this version is effectively a cut down version of LR)

Bridge Is perfectly adequate for me to organise my shots.

monk3y wrote in post #9631676
I have both... I don't like bridge, and CS4 is a bit too technical for editing for me... so i always use lightroom first to edit, crop, align etc the picture then export to CS4 to add boarders and watermarks.

if i can do the boarders and watermarks in lightroom then i really don't have much need for CS4 except if i want fancy effects like isolation, fake tilt shift etc...

Borders and Copyright text

Other goodies

So, lightroom has nice boarders and copyright text? CS4 does not?

Lightroom = Easy & Fun
CS4 = Hard & Endless Learning Curve

John E wrote in post #9632491
Lightroom = Easy & Fun
CS4 = Hard & Endless Learning Curve

Funny - i never found it hard to pick up and use. I would agree about the learning curve but that is a good thing IMHO - it means there is power there that I can learn about and use in future.

My recommendation - Lightroom and PSE. Lightroom is great for cataloging and for 99% of what I need to do to a raw file. PSE (or PSP or even Gimp) should be good enough for the remaining 1%.