My 5 cents (we discontinued pennies in Canada) - LR is your digital darkroom. It is used to develop your film (raw image) and can adjust exposure, WB, saturation, contrast, sharpness and noise very well.

PS and PSE are your touch up tools to make correction or adjustments to specific parts of the frame. Dodging, burning, removing imperfections, cropping, etc.

Adobe has improved the software so that there is some overlap, but they are still different, and used for different purposes. It is possible to use ACR instead of LR to develop, but LR has a better interface and more functionality. If a photographer does not shoot raw, he/ she does not need LR.

I shot the attached photo last Monday night about 100 miles east of Denver, CO, while doing some night sky photography. I edited it in Photo Shop Elements 11. I realized I was seeing what I believed to be the aurora borealis to the north and started taking pictures of it.

A friend sent me a link of a 'professional' editing a shot of the Milky Way using Lightroom. I've used Photo Shop Elements for years, in several versions and currently use PSE 11. After watching the video, I'm wondering if I should purchase Lightroom to give me more tools to edit my night sky shots...

The attached was shots at ISO 3200, f8, 20 second exposure with a 17 - 35 mm lens set at 17 mm.

What does the panel of experts think? How much will I gain by going to Lightroom from PSE?

I awoke this morning relaxed and in a good mood... then my day was ruined. Before reading this post, I knew that East is East and West is West, and "God's in his Heaven/All's right with the world!"

To me Lightroom was a tool to wake up Raw Files for those who could not afford a camera that did it for them generating fine JPEG photos within. Those cameras that were poorly engineered that they needed sensors that were the size of old 35mm film instead of neat efficient sensors in compacts with one-do-all lenses. Raw sort of being a film base throwback. Lightroom had limited abilities compared to PS... simple and comfortable way to view life in the Digital Age if Images, OK?

Then, this upstart Dngallagher made the absurd disturbing statement "Lightroom is a parametric editor, where PSE & Photoshop are PIXEL editors - they each do different functions in reality." Parametric editor??? What the hell?

Now instead of taking photos I will sitting with friends Friday night discussing Philosophy of PIXEL vs PARAMETRIC EDITING. Probably my friend Jim, blind since birth, having a PhD in Philosophy and Suzan a Psychologist will be the major forces in the discussion especially when the reality that Dngallagher spoke of dissolves in ethanol. Both feel that Reality is Now, not some 2d photo of the interpretive past.

Dngallagher go soak your head in Developer, Stopbath, and Fixer.... I only need to DO, not Know... yet I am now compelled to dig deep into the LR vs PS editing philosophy vs taking great photos... MY DAY IS RUINED....

I shot the attached photo last Monday night about 100 miles east of Denver, CO, while doing some night sky photography. I edited it in Photo Shop Elements 11. I realized I was seeing what I believed to be the aurora borealis to the north and started taking pictures of it.

A friend sent me a link of a 'professional' editing a shot of the Milky Way using Lightroom. I've used Photo Shop Elements for years, in several versions and currently use PSE 11. After watching the video, I'm wondering if I should purchase Lightroom to give me more tools to edit my night sky shots...

The attached was shots at ISO 3200, f8, 20 second exposure with a 17 - 35 mm lens set at 17 mm.

What does the panel of experts think? How much will I gain by going to Lightroom from PSE?

Best advice:

Those who tell you "I'll never go back to PS - especially if I shoot Raw" and "PSE is a pig"... IGNORE THEM like the plague!

When LR started getting popular, I avoided it because, to me, it was nothing more than an image management system. I will still argue that 60% (or more) of the code inside LR is image management code (database) and has nothing to do with image editing which was stolen from ACR and PS.

PSE is simply PS lite. IF you don't do a lot of post processing and have PSE, there is nothing wrong with staying with what you have. IF you feel that you are missing out then, by all means TRY the 30 day trial of LR/PS 2015.

There definitely are more bells and whistles in LR 2015 than PSE (any version) so, if that's what you are looking for....

Understand I respect you and Dngallagher a great deal and say "thank you" to you for past enlightenment and will again in the future ... all the while eating humble pie with pecans on top ... drinking morning (15 bar steam brewed) gourmet coffee.

Gene, Please realize that I am indeed a tech guy and did not know the different innards of the workings of PS vs LR, except that converting my raw images required LR or similar. Just never really questioned or realized the differences were distinctly basic rather than just different tool boxes. One is metric, one is inches ... a very easy simplistic wrong headed view that uninformed many probably hold.

Additionally, I surly know the advantage of larger sensors, and the limitations of my small compact, but also the advantage of having it in my pocket vs my backpack of DSLR and supporting cast that is home when a happening happens.

So if you did not see the humor in my purposely ironic statements, then I have inadvertently and apologetically stepped on one of your sensitive toes... My comments were to add a smile to the serious discussion while point out that I need to dig deeper into the subject early in this morning of complacent bliss.

By the way I do have a blind friend who was an accomplished videographer for NASA... how tragic for an image person to no longer see... like a chef who could no longer taste.

I take no offense you were defending technology and a friend.

Altho the "need to know" is a life long affliction that I have enjoyed since my long ago youth and the basis for the success in my profession... of being an industrial science guy.. fun... and got paid.

There is a Zombie Myth that says that LR can effectively replace a pixel-level editor. This is strongly supported by the marketing for LR and other parametric raw converters, like Capture One and DXO.

Two words for that - It Doesn't.

Parametric editing is very powerful but basic. Easy to adjust color and white balance, exposure, black, dark, white and highlight levels, clarity vibrance and saturation, color by color hue, saturation, luminance, lens corrections, limited sharpening and denoising. There are some local adjustments that can be made, but with minimal precision - it offers a customizable brush, radial gradient, and linear gradient tools, red eye removal and spot removal tool (resembles a Photoshop Patch tool but not nearly as effective). That pretty much sums it up.

If you want to make precise layer masks, color channel based operations, extremely precise local adjustments. use layers brushes and their blend modes to alter or adjust your images, use non-destructive dodge and burn layers, perform frequency separation to address inconsistent color in areas that contain texture (cloning, patching and content aware does not preserve texture), and a very long list of etcs that will boggle your mind, you need a pixel editor.

LR and its PS companion, Adobe Camera Raw, are intended to complement each other.

Raw converters produce excellent proofs in the shortest time possible. Pixel editors are used for image finishing, particularly if you go to print. LR-only printed images are relatively easy to tell apart from those that have been carefully "finished" in Photoshop.

Best thing to do if you want to improve your images, since you are already familiar with Photoshop Elements, is to get the LR/PS subscription and don't look back. It's the best package out there, with few compromises. And it is the best supported by the third party plugin market.

LR is not a replacement for a pixel editor.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Thank You = Again, Gene, for the education on LR and PS. This explains things to me about the two... And I now understand better for the reading of your explanation.

I do not make use of LR as I could not "get my head around it" - I think that the "File System" really annoyed me and did not proceed with really learning the program. So I gave it to my son and he liked it.

I shoot in RAW - Store them in Three places - On my computer's H.D. and two portable drives. The images that I work on are on the Computer's H.D. and I open those with Adobe Bridge as "Open In Camera RAW". Do my adjustments there and Open in P.S. CS-5.

This works for me. Others will have their own way, and should. Whatever is Comfortable for them.

There is a Zombie Myth that says that LR can effectively replace a pixel-level editor. This is strongly supported by the marketing for LR and other parametric raw converters, like Capture One and DXO.

Two words for that - It Doesn't.

Parametric editing is very powerful but basic. Easy to adjust color and white balance, exposure, black, dark, white and highlight levels, clarity vibrance and saturation, color by color hue, saturation, luminance, lens corrections, limited sharpening and denoising. There are some local adjustments that can be made, but with minimal precision - it offers a customizable brush, radial gradient, and linear gradient tools, red eye removal and spot removal tool (resembles a Photoshop Patch tool but not nearly as effective). That pretty much sums it up.

If you want to make precise layer masks, color channel based operations, extremely precise local adjustments. use layers brushes and their blend modes to alter or adjust your images, use non-destructive dodge and burn layers, perform frequency separation to address inconsistent color in areas that contain texture (cloning, patching and content aware does not preserve texture), and a very long list of etcs that will boggle your mind, you need a pixel editor.

LR and its PS companion, Adobe Camera Raw, are intended to complement each other.

Raw converters produce excellent proofs in the shortest time possible. Pixel editors are used for image finishing, particularly if you go to print. LR-only printed images are relatively easy to tell apart from those that have been carefully "finished" in Photoshop.

Best thing to do if you want to improve your images, since you are already familiar with Photoshop Elements, is to get the LR/PS subscription and don't look back. It's the best package out there, with few compromises. And it is the best supported by the third party plugin market.

LR is not a replacement for a pixel editor.