Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

It should be interesting to see how they implement full raw support this fall when On1 11 comes out. On1 is seriously good software, but not up to the challenge of retouching. I do restoration and retouching with PS, and I do image enhancement (not the same) with On1 and other plugins. Each have their purpose. Photoshop is absolutely the go to app for retouching.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

It seems that you are in the minority of people who feel they must complain about the subscription model for no valid reason. And interestingly, also have no direct experience with it. I have yet to read about a subscriber that is not happy with their PS/LR subscription, and will be reverting to standalone versions of each. There is zero value to investing even $5 in outdated software that is about to be orphaned (CS 6 was released in 2012 and lightroom 6 2014) since Adobe has been quite clear that it will be withdrawing support - initially by no longer upgrading, and eventually by no longer supporting with updates or tech support. You might want to download the trial just so you have firsthand information, and hopefully stop making silly statements that have no relationship to the truth. Just sayin'

jgunkler

Buy Lightroom. It will duo everything you need for a long time to come and much more easily learned than Photoshop. I recently switched to the Adobe subscription (for $7.99 a month through one of the online photography forums) because Adobe has already enhanced Lightroom and will continue to do so in the subscription version but not the standalone. I get Photoshop for the once-in-awhile use for "free" (to my mind!?)

BTW, the enhancement that lured me is the Dehaze slider. Very helpful for many of my travel landscape shots.

Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

Since you are not already burdened by overexposure to PS and LR, try Corel's Paintshop Pro latest version. (You get to try it for free.) Lots of good youtube training videos. For those of us who started with PS version 2 or 3, etc. changing is harder, but it is one way not to become an Adobe slave. There are also free and other low cost excellent products like Freestone, Gimp, Aftershot, ACDSee. All of which will match LightRoom and some go much beyond it to rival Photoshop. At least read reviews. Just because PS is the big boy on the block doesn't make it the best.

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

I'll let you decide for yourself regarding purchasing or renting LR. However, PS is the way to go if you are planning on retouching to any degree. The Creative Cloud will give you both for a rental fee.
--Bob

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

I rent Photoshop/Lightroom CC by the year that way I only make one payment a year and get a small discount.
Craig

sodapop Loc: Bel Air, MD

I have LR and PS. In my opinion they are the best. Maybe that is why they are the "big boys"

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Not true. Lightroom's utility is in cataloging, organizing and exporting your digital images. PS won't do that part.

SharpShooter Loc: NorCal

I think that when looking at and considering a PP program, one can not overlook the sheer volume of material in the way of training resources that are available for Adobe products.
The use of Adobe products are taught in every art school, high school, or virtually any institution that deals with any kind of imaging.
If you need to know something about it in the middle of the night, just call your neighbor, if he doesn't know, ask the grade school kid across the street. Just saying!!
SS

Bill_de Loc: US

I don't know where that information is coming from. Unless they fire Tom Hogarty, the project manager for Lightroom they will continue with stand alone versions of LR, but not PS.

"TH: This will not impact your previous standalone version of Lightroom and we will continue to provide upgrades to the perpetual versions of Lightroom"

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Your class really confused you apparently. LR and PS have nothing to do with each other. LR is a stand alone software that can be bought because it's rather inexpensive. The last time I bought it, I believe it was $59 at B&H. But it also comes along free with Photoshop CC in the creative cloud online photography package for $10 a month. As soon as I got Photoshop CC, I never opened LR ever again. I have a stand alone version on my hard drive and downloaded the newest one with my Photoshop CC too. But I don't use either one.

Photoshop on the other hand is FAR more extensive and does what's called "layers" editing. Let's say you want to darken blown out windows. You highlight the windows with a tool that creates a lasso around the window, choose the exposure altering tool and reduce gamma until objects in the window are revealed and the window panes are considerably darker. That change resides on a layer. You want to increase color saturation of some other object, let's say a large red vase of red carnations sitting on a table. You highlight it with the selection tool, click on the saturation tool, and increase saturation far above normal until the red is at any level you want. That change is now on a layer as well. You want to increase contrast on some furniture near a window that is slightly foggy because of the window light behind it. Highlight the couch back and hit the contrast button to increase the contrast of just the couch back. That is now on another layer. If you decide you don't like the flaming red vase of flowers, delete the layer and that change is gone. You can save the file in Photoshop format and it retains all your layers individually for later adjusting, or you can merge all the layers and flatten the photo so the layers are gone and all the things you adjusted are permanently done to the original photo. It's like the old overhead projector plastic layers stacked on top of each other. If you had one line of text on each plastic sheet, the total stack may be projecting 10 lines of text. In Photoshop if you had 10 layers of changes they are stacked on top of each other (layered) and the stack equals the end result you wanted to see. I do editing of 50 to 70 HDR auto-bracketed sets of 7 exposures every day, by using Photomatix bulk processing to create the HDR single TIFF files, and then go into Photoshop CC and do everything else until I have finished products in JPG format to send out.

You can't do ANY of that with LR because it doesn't have layers. You can increase or decrease gamma of the WHOLE photo, increase the color saturation of the WHOLE photo, etc. and do a number of other things to the WHOLE photo but not to individual components or areas of the photo.

Photoshop has it's own Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) module which acts 95% like the editing abilities of LR so you don't need LR with Photoshop CC.

LR's unique ability, if you enjoy it, but I and many others don't, is it's "Librarian" which tracks where your files are on your hard drive and allows you to move things around in a very different manner than Photoshop uses. Some people love it but I find it to be a total nightmare. Lots of people have great difficulty understanding the LR Librarian, lose things on their hard drive, freak out when they think they've deleted files when they really didn't, delete files when they didn't want to, etc. Photoshop on the other hand has a file manipulation module called Bridge which acts, to me at least, like a massive Windows Explorer or File Manager on steroids. It's understandable by anybody who has ever used their operating system's file management scheme. It also has other screens to look at your files in different ways if you want to but none of them will confuse you into thinking you lost something.

I don't see the point of buying Photoshop for more than $500 when you can have it for $9.99 a month, get free updates for the whole time you are a subscriber, never have to pay for an update to a new version, and it includes LR if LR really thrills you. You can have PS-CC for 50 months for the price of buying the stand alone version outright and you're not stuck with an old Photoshop CS2 or 3 or 4 or whatever at that point.

GENorkus Loc: Washington Twp, Michigan

As I mentioned before, I don't use Light Room but I do believe in helping those who do when I happen to come across something of interest. Such is the case here; http://www.steeletraining.com/tutorials/lightroom-confusion/ Check it out, if nothing else it interesting.

This, (and some others), is free. He does sell other training videos if interested.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

While there is no catalog in PS, Bridge does a great job at everything else. And if you use other Adobe apps, it is a breeze to move files between all the applications using Bridge.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

A lot has changed since TH wrote those words in 2014. The "official" current position is that they are not saying what they will do. This may be mostly conjecture, but the trend seems to be to move everyone to the subscription model and do away with the perpetual. After all, that is the reason why they introduced it. By streamlining the product lines, they can focus on the delivery-by-download subscription and do away with everything else. My guess is that they will continue to add more feature and function to the subscription model, specifically leaving the perpetual users, referred to as casual users, out in the cold. this makes signing up for the subscription model a total no brainer. Cheaper, better, faster, always up to date - who can argue that this is a bad deal? Oh, yeah, there are those that think they "own" software if they take possession of plastic media. These individuals need to read their license agreement - all they "own" is the permission to use Adobe's software, and the actual media. The intellectual property contained on the media is exclusively Adobe's.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Marco, do you really think you are qualified to post an opinion on software that you admit you don't actually use? Doing much of what you describe in the paragraph above can be done effectively and much faster in LR - using the adjustment brush, linear graduated filter and radial graduated filter - all of which are targeted adjustments. Many of the global adjustments that are available to the entire image - like color temp, green-magenta tint, exposure, contrast, highlight/shadow recovery, white and black clipping points, clarity, dehaze, saturation, sharpness, noise, moire mitigation, defringing - can be applied locally with adjustable opacity, with far greater ease and speed than the two step (or more) process of making a selection and/or mask and applying an adjustment to that selection. But if you know Photoshop, all of this should be familiar to you, since these adjustments are available in ACR. While it is not a substitute for the precise editing capability of PS, it does make a lot of things way easier in many situations.



ACR is 100% equivalent in tools and capabilities to Lightroom. While you don't "need" Lightroom if you have Photoshop, when you have to edit a 1200 image wedding job from 4 different cameras (your cameras and those that your second shooter used), and you have to make them look reasonably consistent - there are only two tools I can think of that will allow you to do this in a reasonable amount of time - Lightroom and Capture One. No, you are correct, you can make do with just Photoshop, just like you can drive a screw into a piece of wood with a hammer, though I think you'd have to admit it is far easier to use a screwdriver. Using LR is considerably faster and more efficient, mostly due to it's wonderfully organized user interface - and can turn a day's worth of work into something you can do in a couple of hours.



Once again, your lack of hands-on experience with LR limits the value of your opinion. I am a member of a couple of professional photographer organizations - and the two go-to applications for raw conversion are Lightroom and Capture One. That's more than "some people." More like the overwhelming majority.

Adobe has done a terrible job at providing a training guide to explain how the catalog works. 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 out there. People freaking out are a result of poor documentation and support and people expecting it to work like every other software application they have used, not a deficiency in the software. Once you invest the time to learn it, you'll wonder what you did without it.

BTW, I have been a Photoshop user since version 4 (not CS4) which was published in 1996, and a Lightroom user since version 3, published in 2009. While I am far from being an expert, I use both on a daily basis, along with a host of other programs, to edit and enhance my images.

A tip - if you are doing 7 images to create an HDR, you either have a very old camera with limited dynamic range, or you are doing more than you have to - most HDR can be handled with 2-3 images at most - bracketed with 2 stops.Your images will be cleaner as a result.

Check out the HDR and Pano merge capability in LR- if you still have it - it works great and it is faster and generally produces better results than the comparable processes in PS. For real estate, where tone mapping often produces over-the-top results, the simple fusion that LR does is great. And you get all of this for $10/mo. Such a deal!