DPP - Lightroom - CS5

Hi Tony, back again for an advice though the question may sound foolish. If I buy LR 3 (for $ 300); do I get Adobe Photoshop with it as well?

Thanks in advance.

No. That would be nice. We can dream though.

sanjeedbd wrote in post #11284516
Hi Tony, back again for an advice though the question may sound foolish. If I buy LR 3 (for $ 300); do I get Adobe Photoshop with it as well?

Thanks in advance.

Heh! Sorry, Photoshop and Lightroom are separate. I believe that occasionally Adobe offers a Lightroom discount when someone buys Photoshop CSx but I don't have the details. Since PS retails for maybe $650 or so and LR retails for about $300 I'm not surprised that they'd offer a bit of a discount but I wouldn't expect for them to give either away!

Many of us used Photoshop prior to moving to Lightroom, and the good news is that it is relatively inexpensive to upgrade either of them -- about $300 to upgrade CSx and about $100 to upgrade LR.

But, since LR has become so powerful and so popular, many people make the leap to LR before getting "photoshopped" and for those in that boat generally it's good advice to look at Photoshop Elements to do the kind of image editing that Lightroom is not designed to do. Since Lightroom has the full Raw processor that is part of the Photoshop CSx package then you can get an amazing amount of work done in Lightroom and then for the occasional "special task" you will find that Elements is well packed with very good tools and features. The biggest area where Elements falls behind (well, besides a limited Raw processor) is that it lacks automation tools -- an area that has set Photoshop CSx apart because of its ability to record actions and to use them through Bridge its front-end interface so that both simple tasks and relatively complex tasks can be automated for single as well as batches of images.

But, although these things are appealing, especially to pros and hobbyists who shoot a fair volume of photos, for a great many/most of us, the powerful processing abilities of Lightroom, including its batch processing abilities, do all we need to many photos so that a trip to PS is rarely needed. And so many people have found Elements to meet that need quite well.

Thanks Tony.

I'm unsure about some very basic tasks and curious whether LR 3 will incorporate them (I saw LR 2 only for a while). These are trimming/cropping, resizing, remove/erase parts of images and replace it with sth else from same image.

Lightroom 3 key features include "Photoshop integration" - unclear what that means!

Well, one at a time:

Lightroom has an excellent cropping tool, a bit different from the way the Photoshop tool does both in the way you do it but also in the fact that I'll mention about resizing -- Lightroom only crops with the cropping tool but Photoshop can be set to resize at a certain PPI resolution and inches.

Lightroom doesn't resize withing the program because you are working with Raw and the Raw processing model doesn't involve direct image manipulation including things like resizing. What Lightroom does have is the Export function which converts your Raw data into an image file/format -- a jpeg, tiff or psd are the common ones. The Export dialog is also where you set your image dimensions for resizing as well as various other things like the destination to save your converted files in. It is a great quick way of doing everything from saving for things like the Web or email or clients or also saving full-size full-res images for printing.

Now the remove/erase/replace thing -- these are image manipulation tasks that are so common in everything from simple freeware programs to the full-blown Photoshop tools that some people don't "get" why a major program doesn't have tools like that. The answer relates to what I said about resizing in Lightroom -- a Raw processor such as Lightroom is designed to develp Raw data in a way that can retain the original Raw data and store processing data but not actually change the image until you Export it. There are some tools that let you do limited things, and cloning it one of those tools. It's best for small things like dust spot removal but I and others have used it for more extensive things -- you can patch part of your image over another part and the program is able to record and store the data, but it's not the best for cloning -- this is why I always recommend that an LR user also get something like Elements! Other things that Lightroom has added over time are pretty powerful -- well, an oldy is a very basic RedEye removal tool, but newer things are a Gradient filter and local adjustment brushes where you can apply most of your LR adjustments in various ways over areas of the image rather than just globally using sliders and such.

So get the idea of a Raw process/workflow down -- read up on it before committing to Lightroom, and do the test trial and work the heck out of it, check out the LR tutorial sites (AdobeTV, LightroomKillerTips.co​m, LightroomQueen.com are some that have very good resources) and, make sure you latch onto an image editor such as Elements that can do those other things so well.

Tony, I don’t know how to say this. Sure great people possess big hearts.

Consultancy isn’t free anywhere whereas I’m receiving so many valuable ideas from u – free, it’s incredible. I don’t know how to express my indebtness but allow me to say – it really has helped enormously. Tried to express my profound gratitude through this small token:

Nice duck! I spent some time in Singapore a few years age but the camera I had with me malfunctioned!