wapiti Loc: round rock, texas

Nicholas DeSciose

That’s very good advice, get both learn them.

BruceS

I prefer Bridge and PS. Not what you asked, I know.

Paul Buckhiester Loc: Columbus, GA USA

marty wild Loc: England

An absolute beginner try out free stuff first, The two programs your are asking about are pro use and difficult to jump in and run with results. I have both on subscriptions they are a wonderful realistically I use about 10% of the software capabilities and plan to cancel at the end of the year period

tdozier3 Loc: Northern Illinois

There is more to choose from besides the two, without a monthly subscription fee. You can buy and own the software for less than what a years subscription is. Shop around and do a little research.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

There is no "or"! Those are two completely different types of software used for entirely different purposes. Whichever fits your needs best, or get both!

rcarol

Exactly.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

No. Only Photoshop Elements is sold that way.

Lightroom Classic is easily worth the 10 bucks a month if you do a lot of post-processing.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Realistically, there’s a workflow here. Start in LR and end in LR, but WHEN NEEDED, export to Photoshop, Affinity Photo, NIK plug-ins, or whatever you need to finish an image. It’s pretty seamless.

ecurb Loc: Metro Chicago Area

What he said!
Lightroom is a powerful organizing, filing, cataloging tool. Start organizing your digital files now and maintain your files as you grow. I'm trying to scan over fifty years of film photography with formats from Minox to 20x24 and that will probably take the rest of my life.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Neither... Or both.

As a beginner at post-processing, I'd recommend Adobe Elements 2020, instead.

Elements is more of an "all in one" than either PS or LR.

Technically, LR and PS are not compete without each other. LR is an organizer, cataloger, batch RAW converter with minimal image editing capabilities. PS is the Mack Daddy of all image editors, but has little organizing/cataloging capabilities and does RAW conversions one at a time.

Elements has a lot of built-in support for new users. PS and LR have none.

You can choose from "Beginner", "Intermediate" and "Expert" modes in Elements. There are no such modes in PS or LR.

Elements can do many of the same things that PS or LR can do. Although Elements is sort of a "lite" version, at it's core is the Adobe Camera Raw engine, same as in both LR and PS.

There are tutorials, books and plug-ins for Elements, same as there are for PS and LR.

In fact, for Elements or LR you might need one or two books, may want to take a class or two. PS, on the other hand, would take a stack of text books and a year's worth of college level courses to learn to fully use it. (I've been using PS since the mid-1990s... and am still learning new stuff all the time!)

Elements is cheaper and sold with a perpetual license. In other words, you pay once (recently it's been around $70 for Elements 2020) and can use it as long as you like. If you never upgrade your camera and Adobe never adds new features to future versions of Elements that you feel the need for, you never need to buy a new version. The current version will be kept up-to-date for about a year... with occasional updates. But after that it would be necessary to buy a whole new copy of it.... such as if you get a new camera that's not compatible with your current version.

PS and LR are now only offered via subscription. Most users qualify for the $10 a month deal (actually a year prepaid for $120... to be renewed annually). This gets you both, via a download. And they can be kept current with automatic updates. (Those can sometimes backfire, such as couple years ago when Adobe made some key changes to LR that sent users screaming and the company had to quickly issue a revision.)

Yes, $10 a month is a good deal.... But I would only recommend LR and PS if you are a very high volume shooter (LR is faster handling large quantities of images) AND/OR if you are a pro shooter (some commercial usage requires file types and color spaces that can only be achieved with PS). But if neither of these describe you, Elements might well be all you ever need.

Note: If you also want to work with video, you'll need Elements Premiere 2020, too. Often it's offered discounted in a bundle with Elements Photoshop 2020.

Also: All this Adobe software is available to "try before you buy" with a free 30-day trial. Personally I think that's only practical with Elements and LR. PS is just too complex to get up to speed and learn to use effectively in 30-days. I'd only recommend experience PS users do a trial. With Elements and LR it's another matter, though in either case I would recommend you buy and read a book prior to starting the trial, and have the book for reference during the trial period to get the best evaluation of the program. There are lots of books on all three programs. I'm most familiar with Scott Kelby's and recommend them. Victoria Brampton is known as the "Lightroom Queen", also has some excellent books, as well as online tutorials. I'm sure there are some other very good and helpful books.... check out the reviews on Amazon. Just be sure you're looking at and buying a book covering the current or particular version of software you'll be testing. There are also trials for some of the alternative software programs. I've looked into a replacement for Lightroom and gotten a lot of positive feedback about Capture One (powerful but expensive at $300), Alien Skin Exposure X and On1. The last two sell for roughly $100, perpetually licensed with update support (at least until eventual major program upgrades). I have not looked into alternatives for Photoshop (one thing at a time!)