lightroom vs photoshop for an improver

Hello. I have an older friend who is doing some courses locally to go beyond point & shoot. Now the course tutor is using lightroom to show what can be done. However, they have a very nice & spiffy version of photoshop or CS whatever pre-loaded on a laptop they've just bought. Matey runs photoshop courses too, but is favouring lightshop, which I presume is rather cheaper to buy, what with CS being a pro tool.

So...should she do a wee basics on photoshop course, or bite the bullet & buy lightroom? Seems silly to me, seeing as she has photoshop already. Better off buying a decent lense eh?!

And no, mac is out of the question, although had I known they were buying new kit I might have suggested it. Her husband is a very keen photographer-they have some nice canon equipment.

Lightroom is very good and will cover everything you need for processing digital pictures, has tons of features, and will catalogue them as well if you wish, and more importantly very easy to use and learn.
Photoshop is commercial software, for fairly heavy weight manipulation and retouching, and probably no more advanced than lightroom for your everyday photo touching up.
Adobe do 30 day trials of all their software, download it and give it a go.

Originally Posted by Danny_Two

Adobe do 30 day trials of all their software, download it and give it a go.

now that is useful-cheers!

I'd agree with a trial of both.

But I'd favour LR easily over PS, even if they cost the same (which they don't by any stretch). PS is a multi-purpoise tool that covers photography, print design, web design, animation and 3D. It's a jack of all trades and, quite frankly, shows it. I've been using it daily for 20 years now (Fuck! Really?) and admit that I've started to grow to despise it a bit over recent years. Each new release adds loads of pointless shit and fails to address bugs that have been there for years now. It's becoming a mess. Standard procedure with a new release is to spend the first 2 days scouring the web trying to work out how to turn all the horrible shit they've added off and make it usable again. Forums are full of people doing the same. It's like they're ignoring the pros and trying to add all kind of superfluous visual tricks to lure in newbies. Usability gets worse with each release I'm afraid.

It's a huge beast of a programme and is an unwieldy one these days too. It's massively powerful and is the absolute de facto software for many situations even now. But photography isn't one of them any more. With Aperture and then Lightroom being released and being properly dedicated photo apps for the whole photographic workflow, there's virtually no need to use PS for anything photo-related at all any more, the odd exception granted. If it was personal cash and a choice which path to take then it's even clearer. 600 quid for the bloated vastness of PS, 95% of it won't be relevant, or 200 quid for something that does only photos and can do far, far more in that area that PS can. No question at all. You'd have to buy at least one other pro app for storing and cataloguing on top of PS too, and it still wouldn't match what LR can do.

My personal choice would be Aperture on a Mac, especially as it's a currently a rather ludicrous 45 quid. Still, if your friend is planning to continue suffering a PC then it'd have to be Lightroom. Which is fine.

Still worth trialling them though. But the 28 days of PS use will mainly involve working out how to switch off all the annoying shit and which of the endless menus they've hidden it it A 2nd hand copy of CS3 (current is CS5) would be far better and potentially save some cash.

thank you Slenver, I was hoping you might pop in!

I've photoshop 7 on my PC. It does pretty much what I need-TBH I haven't explored much of it. Any free upgrades or would it really be worth me looking into CS3 above that?

If they're serious about all this (& her HP laptop is just about to expire) do you reckon a macbook, or an older workstation type arrangement might be worth 'investing' in?

Originally Posted by Editor

thank you Slenver, I was hoping you might pop in!

I've photoshop 7 on my PC. It does pretty much what I need-TBH I haven't explored much of it. Any free upgrades or would it really be worth me looking into CS3 above that?

If they're serious about all this (& her HP laptop is just about to expire) do you reckon a macbook, or an older workstation type arrangement might be worth 'investing' in?

Happy to be here

PS7 was fine... though it is quite old. I really can't remember exactly what changed in what version, but I'd say CS3 was the furthest you'd want to go. I didn't have CS4 - nobody did because it was slated in all the reviews. CS5 is supposedly their comeback but I think it's shite. You won't get any free full version upgrades past 7 though. Thing is, each version past, say, 7 doesn't really add core functionality in the main. It's just bells and whistles and animation and 3D and web stuff. The core photography editing has barely changed so I wouldn't worry too much. Performance might be an area though - advantage of modern OSs, multi-cores, GFX acceleration and stuff... that might be worth getting something newer for.

As for a Mac... well, it's all the classic arguments. Is a Mac really going to be any faster or provide extra functionality or anything else of real empirical advantage? Nope. Do the huge majority of creative types using these apps prefer them though? Yep. Given a choice between two similarly-specced machines for the same price, there's really very little reason not to choose a Mac. If it comes to the worst then you can put Windows on it anyway so there's no way to lose. If she's happy with a PC though then there's no real reason to change. Like almost all Mac users I'd rather chop my hands off than have to use a PC every day but it hard to quantify and, ultimately, the differences are small.

It does open up more software though, Aperture being one. In fact, the iPhoto app that comes for free is a decent starting point and can be moved to Aperture easily enough. But Lightroom is also good and plenty on a Mac use this instead of Aperture. £45 for Aperture though....!

As for a new cheaper laptop or older big workstation.. well, it just comes down to spec and price. And size - Mac towers are hugely expandable but also just hugely huge. And with progress being what it is, a current low-end laptop will outperform the Tower from Hell from maybe 6 or 7 years ago. The middle ground is the current iMacs anyway - the best bang for buck in Macs by a margin and awesome pieces of kit. But not low-end at all despite their name and so not cheap. And you can't build Macs yourself. As every nerd on every forum will tell you, you can build a PC for £1.76 or something. Ultimately you'll never match this from any big name, Apple being far from an exception!

cheers dude.

Londongal needs your aperture expertise over on the apple subforum!

Originally Posted by Editor

cheers dude.

Londongal needs your aperture expertise over on the apple subforum!

I'll get my cape!

Please do! Be free little bird, fly on over! NEwb user! (and it keeps hanging!)

right-she's finally opened up her photoshop 7 & is playing with it.

Slenver, would you be able to recc an online tutorial please? Also, what is the usual best practise process line? I assume correct 1st, then layer etc etc.

The one thing she wants to right now is remove a tree branch! What tool or process is that one please? Blurred background.

Originally Posted by Editor

right-she's finally opened up her photoshop 7 & is playing with it.

Slenver, would you be able to recc an online tutorial please?

Really not sure I'm afraid. I've never really sat down and learned it, just years of slowly learning I do look at tutorials for specific things from time to time but wouldn't know what I've used - I just google.

Originally Posted by Editor

Also, what is the usual best practise process line? I assume correct 1st, then layer etc etc.

Not 100% sure what you mean tbh, but I guess it depends entirely on what you're doing/trying to achieve. Also, the scope and flexibility of it mean that people work in very different ways. Being an experienced photoshopper and sitting down for an hour within another one working is always enlightening! No two paths are the same I think.

Originally Posted by Editor

The one thing she wants to right now is remove a tree branch! What tool or process is that one please? Blurred background.

Again, annoyingly, there are many ways to skin a cat. Essentially you need to find something to replace the branch with - whatever is behind it that it obscures. Hopefully there's more background nearby in the image that's similar enough to clone... and indeed, the 'clone' tool is the tool for this job

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.

that'll do nicely for now-cheers!

Originally Posted by Editor

that'll do nicely for now-cheers!

No problem at all

Originally Posted by Slenver

...PS is a multi-purpoise tool that covers photography, print design, web design, animation and 3D. It's a jack of all trades and, quite frankly, shows it.

I'd agree with that - when I had a photographic shop we used PS LE and another cut down version that sold for less than £50 and we weren't presented with anything we couldn't do. Bearing in mind we did professional restorations and collages, etc.I've used the all singing version and it had a couple of buttons that meant you could achieve the same things with a single button click, as opposed to several. Even those weren't ideal settings and I used an i-colour (I think, and nothing to do with Apple) add-on to help with colour correction.Never used Lightroom, but can I just state, in a very self-satisfied manner, that my hands smell of photographic chemicals today?

Just to drop in my twopence... Lightroom is best used for RAW file workflow, don't bother with it if you are just shooting JPEG.

The only reason to go to the latest version of PS are for its built-in RAW processors for newer versions of the format, which if you have already got Lightroom you don't need.

I only use CS3 these days for cleaning up files for sending to agencies, most of the rest of the work is done in Lightroom. It's quicker, cheaper and integrates very nicely with other tools.

Yes PS is good for manipulating images, but a lot of that work can also be done with tools like GIMP which although a steeper learning curve has the advantage of being free