just ordered Photoshop CS4. What else now?

I've just recently jumped headlong into DSLR after years off from film.

For my business I ordered Adobe CS4 Design Premium and that includes Photoshop CS4 extended. I have a sooper dooper laptop (Dell M6400) running both x32 and x64 (dual boot) with 8 gigs ram. I use this for CAD.

What other software programs should I have for post processing? Lightroom? Anything else?

I plan to shoot almost exclusively in RAW and am cutting my teeth hard on PP (hard study).

Thanks for your insights!

Lightroom would be a good next step for the RAW conversion and basic corrections.

With LR and CS4 you should be pretty well covered.

A lot of the other stuff you may end up buying are plug-ins that will either automate your PP or help in image correction.

Imagenomic do a great package for skin smoothing / noise reduction etc. Noise Ninja is also worthy of consideration. From there the sky is the limit.

Thanks! Are Imagenomic and Noise Ninja plug-ins or stand-alones?

dog rocket wrote in post #9775855
Thanks! Are Imagenomic and Noise Ninja plug-ins or stand-alones?

They are both offered as a Photoshop plug-in, but you can get them in an install that gives both a standalone app and a PS plug-in (a bit more money).