Good for you. I guess you're fully satisfied with editing halfway to the best you could do. Why you would edit with LR or ACR only and not continue to finish the job in PS is beyond me. To each his own.

I agree with that. I read once that there are more than 2,000 denominations, both mainstream and independent, in the U.S. How would one figure out what dogma and doctrine is the right one? That's why I skip all of it. Jehovah Witnesses come to my door and tell me Satan was cast out of heaven in 1910, our spirits stay with our rotting bodies until we rise up at the second coming, but only 144,000 of us are going to be in the city of gold while the rest of us ENJOY toiling at occupations. Billy Graham tells me I need to just say the words that I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior or else I'm going to the fires of hell. Then refers me to any church I choose but I MUST choose one for guidance (the ultimate recruiter to Christianity in general actually). I read of a small denomination in California where if any woman was to be accepted into the church she had to have sex on the altar with the pastor/leader in front of the whole congregation. That included wives as their husbands watched, single girls as their boyfriends watched, and daughters as their parents watched. Polygamists believe polygamy and children with multiple wives is the true way to please God. A high percentage of Monogamists legally marry one and have affairs on the side until divorce which is actually evil polygamy in the shadows of deception. The variations of supposedly Christian denominations go on and on. Who do you believe? Or do you strike out on your own to find truths from various sources and religions to put them together and create a logical (at least to you) dogma of your own that works for you? I personally believe eastern religion of India has a lot to offer anyone professing to be Christian but all mainstream churches are vehemently against studying such things. There's a reason they're vehemently against it. I don't believe it's because you'll find evil there but because you'll find truths and common sense there and Christianity doesn't want you finding things on your own that causes them to lose dominance over you.

In any conclusion you come to, your goal should be to be as positive in this physical life as possible, treat people well by not harming their personal trek through this life, love as much as you can, control yourself to be moderate in all ways, be generous, and have people know you as a very good person they enjoy knowing. That HAS to be pleasing actions to God, no matter what. If your funeral consists of 3 people showing up out of family duty and they stand at your graveside cursing you and urinating into the hole after your casket has been lowered in - you didn't do it right.

The first time I thought about this dogma and doctrine issue was back when "The Waltons" was on TV. Mama always got their herd of kids up on Sunday, got them all dressed up, and went to church. Daddy Walton stayed home, got up and went to work in their mill (on Sunday, shame, shame) and Mama always harassed him about going with them to the church so he could be "saved" and go to heaven when he died. Daddy didn't believe in going to church but he wasn't an Atheist or Satan worshipper. She never gave up on trying to "save" him but he never gave in and went to the church. Her life was stressed by trying to pull him over to her side. She lived her life reading the Bible and acting accordingly. His life wasn't stressed by the subject at all and essentially lived exactly the same way. They had a conversation on the show once where Daddy said, "Liv, I believe in God, work hard, provide for our family as well as I can, we have a great marriage, I love our kids, and I just don't like going to a church building. Why can't you just let things be?" He was right. He pretty much lived the Big 10 and was always doing positive for everyone, so why not leave him alone? So maybe he was a shy person who didn't like to sing in public, didn't like putting on a fake smile for people he didn't really like every week, didn't like reading in public because he didn't read well, and was more stressed out about the hard times of the Depression than worried about his eternal fate. I rather doubt if a vengeful God threw him into a lake of hell fire for not going to the local church building for an hour every Sunday.

When traveling far, I look at and know my directions pretty well before leaving home. Sometimes I'll print out a detailed Google Map of where I'm going. Then I use the GPS as well. If the GPS varies from the printed map, that lets me question the validity or the other based on my personal knowledge. I like the GPS to sit there doing it's thing quietly until it feels there should be a turn or an exit because that makes sure I don't blow right past and miss it, which I'm known to do because I'm having white line fever in a driving coma. I don't get lost very easily (must be my little bit of Cherokee Indian blood!) and can somehow sense how to get back to reality unless there are man-made blockages like dead end roads.

My main use of GPS is in our area cities when I'm trying to find very detailed specific addresses for my every day photo shoot locations. A lot of my area was ruined by the cities putting in canals for drainage (also expressways for gators to more quickly find poodles and babies to eat along the banks) many years ago. So you may have 1st Street North, 1st Street NW, 1st Street E, 1st Street SE, 1st Street NE, etc. And you may also have NE 1st Terrace, SE 1st Terrance, and on and on. So a map is a horror and not usually correct. Using a Google Map, I've been on 1st Street SW, for example, it came to a dead end at a canal, I could see the house I wanted on the other side, and had to go back a mile, go find another parallel street that had a bridge over the canal which is rare compared to how many of the streets dead end instead, and reach the home from the other side - sometimes a 4 mile detour out of the way. Somehow my GPS has never done that to me even though it's not perfectly accurate in amount of feet from the car.

But it does goofy stuff sometimes instead. I'll be blowing along on I-75 in Georgia and it tells me to get off at the next exit although I have another 150 miles to get to my destination. I let it do that once, forgot about it, and let it do that again 3 years later. It then takes me through a medium sized city of stop and go traffic, which can be horrible at the wrong time of day. And puts me back on I-75 after all that. I have it set to give me the fastest route but it does that to me anyway. Total time waster. Sometimes I wonder if that city has a deal with Garmin to build business by wrong routing us there! I did find a pretty nice Asian Buffet there and we were starving by the time we got to it and the city has a lot of new development going on! The only possible other reason is that Garmin is mistakenly taking me on the old US-25 route from before I-75 was built because maps they are inputting have an error there. But that would be an almost 60 year old error because I-75 was completed in the late 60's and early 70's. I've had two Garmins now and they both have that same mistake in them.

My X-wife was one of those who couldn't find her plate with a fork. I let her guide us once using a real folding map years ago and she got us lost out in the country by holding the map upside down. Nowadays she'll end up driving 30 miles out of the way by missing all indications of where she should have gone, even big interstate signs as large as a house. Pitiful. She is one who should have a GPS but wouldn't be able to figure out how to turn it on and find the second screen to type in an address.

So you're confusing me, or maybe us, here. You say you're all for living a basic Christian life and you believe in Jesus. How can you live a basic Christian life which requires believing in God and some concept of Creation, and believe in Jesus who's main job was to teach about God the Father of everybody and everything, human spirits ascending into Heaven, life after death, and being saved from evil to join himself and God in an eternal afterlife? You can't have it both ways. It sounds more like you're living a "moral" life of doing positive things for everybody, everything, and the world as well as you can but not living a Christian life because that requires "belief" in certain things that you say you don't believe in. It sounds like you're living a life of doing what Jesus said (according to the NT) about how to live in this life but not believing he was the first Son of God who taught that it was the way to have eternal spiritual life with God and him after physical death. That would require belief in what he taught. What's the benefit of living a moral life with no hope for it meaning anything to anybody in the end, including yourself? Just because churches are messed up and the Bible is mistranslated doesn't mean you should have no hope for anything other than becoming worm food. I don't get it.

I'm in southern Florida so you'd think I'm close enough to the equator to pickup several easily.

If you updated from Win7 to Win10 using the online upgrade from Microsoft the old photos should still be there somewhere. Win10 has a Windows Explorer type file manager that is very similar to the one in your old Win7. Use it to search for the file name of one of your photos and when it finds it, you'll know from the directory name where the photos are located on the hard drive. If you put a full version of Win10 over Win7, it likely wiped your hard drive clean before it started loading Win10 and the photos are forever gone.

I learned it using a Dummies book but I had already been using Corel Paintshop Pro for several years and they are like foreign cousins from two different companies because Paintshop Pro is a clone of Photoshop that sells for a lot less. Some of my PaintShop Pro knowledge ported over to Photoshop but not everything.

Photoshop can be as easy or hard as you personally make it. It is a monster with abilities to do a lot of things that you and I may never use. That doesn't mean you need to learn them and confuse yourself. You can make a Photoshop experience easy. Or you can create complex artistic accomplishments that take advantage of a lot of tools and abilities. I do the same things to my real estate photos every single day. I have "plug-ins" that further enhance my photos without my doing it manually and that saves me time. From time to time something comes up and I go to a tutorial and read about it and try it. Then I have incorporated one more feature into my knowledge. Like I had to create a 4-page booklet, back cover, and disc artwork for a band's CD. I used Photoshop for the whole thing but I had to learn how to use text, create paragraphs, use templates from the CD printing company, and use external software to create text art pieces to insert in various places of the booklet. It was a learning challenge, and I also did all the photo editing for the cover, but after the mind-blowing learning it came out quite well and I get compliments on it as though I'm a graphic artist. I'm not but I was forced into that endeavor and made Photoshop work with me to get it accomplished. Without the layers ability of Photoshop that I sometimes stacked 15 to 20 deep, I couldn't have done it.

Whether you can use a Dummies book is strictly based on your personal learning curve and your persistence. If you want to read a few pages, dive in, and expect miracles to happen - they won't. There's no Easy Button in PS or LR. If you're willing to read a section and be sitting near your keyboard so you can try whatever they just described several times until you have it engrained in your mind, then you will eventually have the "Lightbulb" go off over your head and you'll get better with it more rapidly. I spent a month with a Dummies book and PS to start to know where stuff was and what it did so I could edit pretty well with it. I used Paintshop Pro for my work during my PS learning time then switched over.

People will tell you that Photoshop is too hard but that's because it is hugely flexible and has many features - many you'll never use or may not use for a couple years after starting out.

You may also want to start with the latest Photoshop Elements instead which is cheap and is not a rental. It simulates the family star "real" Photoshop somewhat and is less than $100 to buy anytime.

That's not true at all. PS has Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) which has identical functions as LR, including RAW conversion, with the only difference being LR's Librarian and PS's Bridge methods of moving files around. If one has PS-CC that has ACR in it they have virtually no reason to use LR nor to even own it.

Well... you make several incorrect assumptions. First, I did NOT state my case from lack of experience. I used LR daily for two years with Paintshop Pro as my layer-based editing program until the PS-CC package became available.

Secondly, a couple professional photographer organizations don't represent an overwhelming majority. My use of the word "some" is relative and not specific anyway. Some like it and some don't, that's a valid statement. I still stand with that statement. I dare say that if you went into a magazine publishing company editing office you would see PS on every single Mac and PC and rarely find LR at all, unless it was a staff photographer who wanted to rough in his or her photos before turning them over to editors. So whether a majority, or a minority, of "some people" is valid would depend on the field of endeavor.

Third, what you described in your feeble attempt to usurp and discredit my comments about layers achieving editing of individual components, you still didn't prove anything different because LR's adjustments can affect a "region" of the photo but there is no possible way in LR to, for example, affect a single item with crisp edges specifically and in detail while leaving the rest of the composition alone. No layers with a lasso selection tool - no can do.

Next, you don't need LR to be able to rough adjust a lot of photos at once to create consistency. I do it all the time in PS. Highlight as many photos as you want in Bridge, left click and open in ACR, choose them all again in ACR, and make edits to one and the same edits happen to all. I do that to three to five groups of 10 to 15 every day and occasionally but rarely to 50 or so. I have presets of what adjustments that I want ACR to make and then go through and fine tune what the preset did a little before moving on sending them to PS.

Contrary to your statement, LR's editor and ACR's editor are not 100% the same. I don't remember what the functions were but another member pointed out about a year ago that LR has one or two things it can do that PS ACR can't. They weren't anything I use, so I didn't really care. But I agree that the two are very, very similar.

Counter tip - You are wrong on your criticism of my camera and what's required for HDR. Yes, an outdoor shot of a home can easily be done in HDR with 2 to 3 frames. There aren't any really dark or washed out areas in a noon time exterior shot so that works. Auto-bracketed sets don't work well outdoors with breezes moving tree limbs, leaves, flowers, and grass though. But when doing interiors, any self-respecting real estate photography article or website by anybody who actually does this work will tell you that you should always use a minimum of a 5-exposure 2-stop bracketed set for interiors. The dynamic light range is very large and requires much more than a measly 2 or 3 frames. Using 2 or 3 frames you might as well not even do HDR at all. Yes, 7 frames is excess when 5 can do the job, but I've got it available and Photomatix bulk processing is fast, so what's the difference? I lose nothing, no more time is used, and I might actually gain in some circumstances by using 7 frames, so I see no reason to change anything. I could probably use JPG instead of RAW and processing would be much faster too but I prefer RAW.

By the way, I'm not going to sit around creating HDR photo blends manually in LR or PS. I'm sure they do a nice job but when I'm merging 350 to 400 frames per day, I have a nice preset in Photomatix and let it do it's thing for half an hour - not burn myself out doing it manually for hours.

The only point you got correct is that I used the word HDR throughout my previous post because the OP, who doesn't have an understanding of LR nor PS, wouldn't know what Fusion is but I'm sure he's heard HDR many times and his class likely discussed it a little to explain what it is. I DO use Fusion all the time and never HDR, partially because Fusion reduces noise in a photo while HDR increases it, and partially because Fusion is renowned as THE method for real estate photography interiors that you want to look absolutely realistic and not like artwork. This is where I will assume YOU have lack of hands-on experience in my field of endeavor, not me.

So then we come to simplicity for the newbie who asked the original question. He can use PS's Bridge which will act like Windows Explorer that he already has some knowledge of - or he can explode his brain doing as you say, "I will admit that initially, I was totally confused by it. But I locked myself in a room for a day, learned its language and logic, and trust me, it is far better and easier to work with than any alternative..." Most people, especially newbies, aren't going to learn it in a day, more likely a week of anguish and not understanding the language of it, then still have problems. I don't like to recommend something that will totally confuse a newbie. I don't want to recommend something that requires a newbie to learn the language and logic of software and become submissive to it instead of enjoying his photography and seeing editing results he's happy with. I don't want to be a librarian or I would have gotten a degree library sciences. I just want to import my photos and plant them in folders I create, and be able to go to those folders easily to get them for various purposes. I don't think "an overwhelming majority" of pro photographers want to fight their software to make it do what they want done. I also don't think an "overwhelming majority" of pro photographers edit their photos to completion without PS's layering. Personally I'd prefer to use PS Elements rather than LR if I didn't use PS-CC.

Drag and drop of files to folders you want them in and know they actually went there immediately is what's far easier and that's what Bridge does - thus LR's librarian is NOT easier. Do a search on UHH and count the number of posts on here over the last 3 years from fearful, grief ridden, posters who have fought LR and lost or fought LR and it put their files where they couldn't find them. It's not just a dozen but hundreds. Is LR's librarian better? Probably because it's more complex and does more. But Bridge is much easier although maybe not as flexible and serves the need of most just dandy.

I'm lucky if my Garmin is accurate to within 50 feet. And that means that many times it tells me to turn on a street after I've already passed it by 50 feet or so. But sometimes that's not true. I assume it's depending on more than one satellite to determine my location and some are more accurate than others. Then again, my new 2015 Garmin came with 2013 maps in it and even though I updated them with my PC they're still 2013 with lots of mistakes.

Download Google Chrome browser from Google, install the Google app in it for G-Mail (if it's not already there), sign in to Google Chrome with your G-Mail user name and password, and you're happening.

It's not a lot different than Win7 if you would have given it a chance. I have Win7 on my desktop PC. I bought a Win10 all-in-one and mastered Win10 within an hour. I bought a new desktop with Win10 a couple months ago, have the two desktops sitting next to each other, linked to the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse with a switch and I move back and forth from Win7 to Win10 and back many times a day with no misunderstanding of either one.

The task bar is on the side instead of the bottom. Big deal. You convinced yourself, probably with the help of reading something by some crabby troublemaker, that Win10 is hard but it isn't. For Vista, XP, and Win7 users it's just like being home and never left. It was Win8 that was a total abortion to most of us.

By the way, if your geek charged you $160 to tell a successful installation of Win10 to revert back to Win7, he laughed all the way to the bank.

I personally watched a tutorial video on the Topaz site. The girl recommended changing the whole scene to blue first, put a line of red around the object to create a closed loop and fill the loop with red, put a line of green to create a closed area wherever the subject is solid and fill the subject closed loop with green. Then you have just a blue edge that needs to be worked on. She was doing a tree that was alone in a field that needed a new sky so she worked with green first and selectively picked colors from the tree limbs and branches to paint the whole tree with. Then she selected a red to fill between the branches with. She said that any trivial little blue that was left would be calculated according to the pixels around it and ReMask would refine your mask when you push the Compute button. In her example it was true. I was interested in this because I put new skies behind homes I shoot for real estate agents when it's a cloudy day or the sky is just white with no blue showing from behind the cloud covering. I do a LOT of tree limbs home roofs, background shrubbery, etc. It works quite well but it's not perfect because I'm working fast. Hair is going to have more shades of color and shadows so you'll have to really zoom in to get it right. Another of their tutorials has a guy cut a furry dog out of a scene and it looks virtually perfect to my eye. Good luck!

It does no such thing. If you choose to leave the settings where the software puts them it does a decent, but somewhat overly fixed, job. I have used it many times, used it three times on whole office head and shoulder shots that were groups of 4 shots each of 12 to 15 people, and all you have to do is fuss around with the sliders and most times reduce them slightly to bring the end result to a point of minimal changes that are indistinguishable from what you'd work your ass off to create manually. I find it quite a time saver and everybody has always been pleased with my results. It's not that I don't know or use PS because I do but why waste my time attempting to prove I'm smarter than software and get the same result?

LandscapePro is a different story. I'm not sure I understand the point of it. That seems more like something to be wildly artistic with instead of slightly enhancing reality. I'll have to review it more and see if it has any benefit at all.

You haven't been watching UHH very closely then because there have been several discussions of file management on here you could learn from.

Your various "Sites" where you are storing photos on your hard drive aren't sites. They are folders on your hard drive with piles of unorganized photo files thrown in there willy nilly. Think of a file cabinet. You open a drawer and there are big hanging green folders with stuff in them. Those are the Photo Gallery, Pictures, and Picasa folders on your hard drive. In each of those big green folders you should have, but don't, smaller manila folders labeled with different subjects. Those are subfolders. Those subfolders can, and many times should, have sub-sub folders inside them too.

Before getting rid of anything, deleting anything, and losing photos that you want to keep, you need to learn organizational skills to put your hard drive in order. If you don't have a file management software, which apparently you don't, you can use Windows Explorer. I personally use Pictures as my main folder for everything to reside in - as my big hanging green folder you might say. When I want to back up all my photos, I just choose Photos, copy it to an external hard drive, and that's very easy. Inside Pictures, I right click and choose to create a new folder. I may call that Family 2013. Another one may be Family 2014. Then another Family 2015. And finally Family 2016. Or I may make one subfolder called Family and put sub-sub folders of 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 inside it. Then you go find the folder where Picasa saves it's files and drag all family photos pertaining to 2013 into that new subfolder of the correct year that you just created. Go to the Pictures where there's a big mess and drag family photos pertaining to 2013 to the correct new folder. Go to everywhere there are photos stored on your hard drive and drag all family photos from 2013 into your newly created folder. You may have some files where Explorer will ask you if you want to replace XXXXX with XXXXX (the same name) and you'll have to decide which one is newer, bigger, or better. If you want to save them both it will save the second one with a (2) behind the name.

This is a long and daunting task to organize 1500 photos, one which you should have started a very long time ago when you only had 50 photos, but now it must be done or you're going to lose a lot of shots you don't want to lose and be forever sorry you did. You'll want to do this to your wife's digital photos as well or you'll lose control of hers too.

You can draw this out on paper before starting if you want to. It's called a file tree and is similar to a family tree. "Pictures" at the very top, lines going to a second layer of major subjects (let's say Family, Pets, Vacations, Steam Trains), lines going from that layer to a third layer (let's say 2013, 2014, etc.), a fourth layer and however many layers you need to create a rather refined organization. Don't worry about getting too refined as you create this. You can always go back and merge some subfolders and sub-sub folders together if there's not much in them or nothing in them. You then end up with Pictures/Family/2013/Jimmy/SportEvents/Baseball/ where the photos of Jimmy playing his first major league game are stored. And Pictures/Family/2015/Martha/Sewing/AwardCeremonies/MountainView/ where the photos of Martha accepting her award at that show for that event are stored.