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Photoshop, Lightroom, or Elements? Reader Q&A

Damien Franco | Dec 05, 2009 | Comments Comments

A reader, who will remain anonymous due to the closeness of the holiday season and the nature of the question, asks:

“Hey, what kind of software do you need to do this to pictures? Is it just photoshop?”

Now, I can’t show you the photograph that this person was referring to because we don’t have permission from that photographer AND it would give away the reader (it’s possible that the reader’s spouse also reads this blog).

The picture was a lomo or holga-esque post process lifestyle portrait from a local photographer in the reader’s area.

A little back and forth between the reader and I produce this information:

  • The reader is looking at software for the reader’s spouse as a Christmas gift
  • The reader’s spouse is a photo enthusiast and quite skilled
  • The reader’s spouse is NOT interested in being a professional photographer
  • The reader’s spouse does not do web design
  • The reader’s spouse is very computer literate and technically savvy
  • The reader’s spouse is a Windows user

Based on this information here was my response:

Adobe Photoshop is really expensive. $700 and truthfully most people don’t need it.

Adobe Lightroom2 is less expensive and can do almost all of the “photography” related stuff. $299 and helps keep all of the photographs organized. It’s truly fantastic and it’s what most pro and passionate photographers are using these days.

Adobe Elements8 is even less expensive at $99 and is actually able to handle most of the things even I need to take care of. It also will help to keep your photos nice and organized.

All three of these products use “Actions and Presets”. Some are free and some can be purchased. They are simply a set of instructions to the image editing program that run a script. The scripts tell the software to add layers, masks, and a bunch of other tweakable things to the photograph. This saves time and helps create consistency in a photographer’s workflow.

I’d bet a hundred bucks this (referring to the photograph) is simply a Holga-esque or Lomography or “cross-processing” action or preset for one of the above mentioned Adobe products. I have a few of them for my Adobe Elements7 on my Dell Laptop and they work great. In fact, here’s an example of an image edited in Adobe Elements7 using a free Lomography “Action”.

I would have killed to have this kind of stuff available when we had our studio. I used to spend hours upon hours working in Photoshop doing things like this one at a time. HOURS!

This image took probably all of 2 minutes to edit once I knew exactly what I wanted the end result to be.

My suggestion for your spouse would be to get Adobe Lightroom2.

Here’s some more info on Adobe Lightroom2 there is a free 30 day trial.

I would also suggest, because it is different from Photoshop or anything else he’s probably tried, this book Adobe Lightroom 2 – The Missing FAQ: Real Answers to Real Questions asked by Lightroom users [Amazon]

Or The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers [Amazon]

Both are books by pro photographers that work directly with Adobe and both tackle the subject from different spaces. You could get both books and they’d be completely different and equally valuable.

There are tons of sites where your spouse could download (for free or for purchase) actions and presets for Lightroom that would be able to do the processing in this photograph and more. I’d be happy to provide links to those and links to instructions on how to use them. It would take your spouse about half a day or so to get pretty comfortable with the process of Lightroom presets. It’s pretty awesome.

Thanks for the question and I’m always more than happy to help. If there are any other questions or you need further clarification my door is always open (or rather my email is always open)!

And that’s what I sent our reader.

Then I got to thinking about it.

What was our reader going to do? Aside from the books there isn’t really anything to open and Christmas is more fun when you get to open a present. So I looked at Amazon and found that ordering Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [Amazon] through Amazon would save her about $22 which would almost pay for either of those books with free shipping. This would allow our reader to actually gift wrap the software and the book or books which is better than a card that says “Your gift is software that we can download later!” and it’ll save our reader a little cash if one of the books gets included in the gifting.

What do you think? Get the software in the box to giftwrap or write it on a card? Any other ideas for our reader?


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  • Photoshop rocks, and is the must-have for the serious designer who likes to tweak his photographs on the side. For photographers, who do not derive their income from using the program like designers do, it is costly as Damien mentions, and the less expensive alternatives are just great for tweaking your photographs. Thank goodness for digital imaging and the ability to tweak digitally. The thought of fiddling around in a darkroom just seems so medieval.
  • Light Room is a very good Raw converter and cataloguing system and is totally loss-less, it treats every file as a Raw file even Tiff and Jpeg.It's designed for rapid work-flow and pre processing your shoot ready for Photoshop. More tools are being added, but it will never be as deep as Photoshop. It replaces and extends the Bridge component of Photoshop, not Photoshop itself.
  • I don't think Lightroom's intention was ever to "replace" Photoshop. I hear over and over again how so many photographers find enough tools and image editing capabilities in Lightroom and/or Elements to get the job done.

    Personally, I haven't opened Photoshop in over a year for the purposes of editing one of my images. The only time I use it is for web work. I can get everything done in either Lightroom or Elements but my style of photography lends to that kind of workflow.

    I used to use Photoshop extensively. Almost every image I used to produce went through Photoshop. Now they don't and I'm a much happier photographer for that.

    Again, this is my workflow and works for my style of photography.
  • I love Elements. I am trying Lightroom because I hear such wonderful things about it. I've downloaded the beta version of Lightroom 3. I will however, purchase those books on your recommendations.

    And if you have a choice, always, always, always, wrap a gift and put it in the person's hands with a hug. It's just not the same as a card.
  • Agreed. While I don't necessarily mind getting cards or gift cards I do feel that most people enjoy giving something more tangible.
  • Rob
    I just got Elements 8 (Mac) as an early Christmas present and I highly recommend it. For Mac users, who got skipped on version 7, it is a HUGE upgrade and brings the vast majority of Photoshop tools. It also includes a full copy of Bridge CS4 (Windows version has "Organizer" instead) and makes working with RAW files easy.

    But I would also recommend downloading the Beta of Lightroom 3. It is free until April 2010 and it is the most stable Beta I have ever used. I bought and never liked Aperture and never felt comfortable in Lightroom 1 or 2. Lightroom 3 is a pure joy to use and while it has not eliminated needing Photoshop Elements, it has reduced how much I use it and made my post processing workflow MUCH faster. It has also convinced me to start shooting RAW as the norm and JPEG as the exception. RAW processing is absolutely seamless.

    I never "got" how to use Lightroom and Photoshop together until now. PSE 8 does everything Lightroom does but not as well. Lightroom does some of the things PSE does but has limits. Together, they are just about perfect.
  • Yes, Lightroom does work well with Photoshop as they are two different products that serve two different needs. Most photographers initially switched to Lightroom as a replacement for Bridge but found that they don't actually open their images in Photoshop very often.

    This, of course, depends on how much pixel pushing you need to do.
  • Rob
    Yup. I use Lightroom for all the basic color and light changes. The Straighten and crop tool is as easy to use as iPhoto's but without the loss of sharpness. And for PSE users, it adds some limited ability to work with curves. ALl that gets me through about 70% of my post processing in half the time I was spending using iPhoto and PSE.

    The remaining 30% goes to PSE for one reason - layers. There is no substitute for layers. I can work around just about everything else short of flat out removing something from a pic.

    :)
  • There's something really satisfying about having a box with a disc and an instruction manual on your pc shelf, I think that'd be the best option.

    I'd recommend Photoshop Elements - the power of layers cannot be underestimated, there's loads of actions (and plug-ins) plus I bet it runs sweet on older, slower pc's, whereas I understand Lightroom runs best on a newer pc.

    Keep up the great work Damien!

    Cheers, Rob.
  • My understanding is that they have newer computers. You're right though that Elements would presumably run better on older PCs.
  • Rob
    One quick exception for Mac users - PSE 8 requires a Core2 Intel processor or better. If you are using a PPC, I recommend PSE 4. Both 5 and 6 for the Mac were steps backwards for the core functions of Photoshop.
  • I'd say Lightroom is a good compromise, and does almost everything a non pro could need. And the book is a good idea - much better to have a hard copy of the "help" in front of you at the time, rather than switching beween tutorials on the 'net and the program.

    (I hope it was my spouse that emailed! It's handy for film guys too!)
  • I couldn't agree more the_wolf_brigade. Being able to navigate the software without switching screens because you have a hard copy in hand can really be beneficial.
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