Mojaveflyer wrote:
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 shot the attached photo last Monday night about ... (
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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.