Let me chime in, though I am mostly lurking these days...
Reply interspersed. On 12/5/2014 10:50, Malcolm Smith wrote:
Photoshop or Lightroom? Lightroom or Photoshop? Or both? Or neither?
All answers are correct :-).
For the last couple of years, photography has been a dormant hobby, the camera really only coming out to record events, usually in jpeg, so I can swiftly take them off the card and e-mail on if required. I now finally have some time to get back and do long overdue photo jobs, you know scan 3-4000 slides and about 1000 rather aged photos, that sort of thing, and I want to improve/repair them as well. Most of them are very old family pictures that, sadly, only I am left to reliably say who they were and when/where they were taken, so this can be passed down to the next generation.
No help here. I think that in general Photoshop is far more powerful image editing tool (notice - I am not saying it is exclusively photography related) and then for slide/scan project it may be more suitable. You simply may need more specialty functionality that Lightroom may or may not provide.
I also want to start shooting more RAW files, and in all the chaos of the last couple of years, I no longer have any reliable software.
I'm a Lightroom user ever since ver 1.0 hit the public. I am a very happy camper.
So, running a Windows PC, I looked at what seems the most popular software and then the reviews on YouTube. In either Lightroom or Photoshop videos (do people call them videos in 2014?), they would tell you why this was the best choice and in the final minute suggest that you'll probably need the other as well. A sitting on the fence special.
Not sure about Photoshop, but you not long ago Lightroom was being offered for 1 or even 2 months free trial. You could download it and play with it some. With a bit of preparatory work/study you could configure Lightroom so that it won't touch your originals. Of if you're lazy/have few originals, you can simply create a full copy and play with the copy.
Anyway, given the vast difference in price between the two (I'll come back to that in a moment), I will be getting a new copy of Lightroom and a 4TB external hard drive this weekend. Then we come to Photoshop. It appears that it is now no longer available to buy as usual software, but as a monthly subscription and use of 'the cloud'. Given that in real terms, external storage in the TB range is cheap - the 4TB drive I'm getting is far cheaper than the 500GB drive a bought a couple of years ago - why would you want to store your work where the provider can either go bust, be hacked or you may have intermittent access to the internet? I also strongly object to paying a monthly fee to something I may or may not use on a regular basis. Next I looked at getting the last software version, but copies of this range from almost free, to re-funding the Apollo missions. Is there an equivalent to Photoshop made by someone else who doesn't want to grip you firmly by the bank account, or have they gripped folk like this as there is no real alternative?
Personally, I don't like the idea of cloud based personal software. I don't mind if it has to do with communications, but this is different. Adobe got hacked some time ago. Depending on what kind of personal information Adobe is storing about their Creative Cloud customers and what of that information leaked, this may be a show stopper or just change-password-and-forget kind of nuisance.
The problem with this service is that it is oriented to countries with word United in their name - United Europe, United State, United Kingdom... Israel is not united. When we used to have a single official Adobe representative company - it was fine. Few years ago Adobe did something and the official representatives became many and not orderly. So, these days I am buying my Lightroom by asking my friends in USA to bring me a box with DVD in it.
I also don't like the idea of open ended price - you pay every month until what?
As for Lightroom vs Photoshop (side issues aside :-) ) - I don't do collages or multilayer editing. So Lightroom suits all my needs as far editing goes. It is also nicely integrated with Google+, Flickr for publishing on-line. It works reasonably fine with Blurb for producing books. So all in all - it is a good integrated program.
I haven't opened Photoshop since like version 8 or so. And I don't need any need to...
YMMV of course. Boris -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
