GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

The Photoshop CC for Dummies is $14 on Amazon. They're selling Kelby's book on LR5 for $36. There's also a book by Andrew Faulkner, "Photoshop CC in the Classroom" for $36 plus another "in the Classroom" book for LR5 for $36

I've worked with Photoshop quite a bit; but, I'm no way near close to mastering it, so for the price, the "Dummies" book may be my best best, even though I'm rather insulted by the title.

Also, I found a book by Rob Sheppard, titled, "Adobe Camera Raw for Digital Photographers Only" and it's only $11. It sounds like this book will take me from the beginning to the end. Plus he follows Ansel Adams ideas about black & white!

So the question remains, Do I just learn Photoshop & Raw, or do I need Lightroom, too? I have my camera set to RAW + Fine.

I will try using Bridge, even though I'm in the habit of creating folders by date & title for all my photo "shoots" in the My Pictures folder, then backing them up after my edits to an external drive.

minniev Loc: MIssissippi

Rob sheppard is a great teacher, his books should help you a lot.

If you are subscribed to CC you have access to Lightroom which is much more valuable than bridge. If your photos are organized already, all you have to do is import them into Lightroom. They can stay right where they are and you can use Lightroom to keep organizing them the same way. Lightroom uses the same tools as camera raw, but with other features for organization, printing, in a very nice interface. But you'll need a book for it too!

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

I guess I must be missing something here. Is there some things Lightroom can do that Photoshop can't? Is that why you need both apps? I understand that not all photos will need Photoshop but can't it do the simpler edits as well as Lightroom?

I plan on staying with the cloud for the first year and really learn the apps available to me. I have plenty of Web addresses for tutorials and ideas for books to better learn these apps (I learn by reading & taking notes..then doing)

This is a rather meaningless question as long as I have the cloud. However, that only works as long as you have an Internet connection. Mine is sporadic so purchasing one stand alone software product might work better for me....and my choices are 1) Photoshop, 2) Lightroom, OR 3) PSE

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

I guess I must be missing something here. Is there some things Lightroom can do that Photoshop can't? Is that why you need both apps? I understand that not all photos will need Photoshop but can't it do the simpler edits as well as Lightroom?

I plan on staying with the cloud for the first year and really learn the apps available to me. I have plenty of Web addresses for tutorials and ideas for books to better learn these apps (I learn by reading & taking notes..then doing)

This is a rather meaningless question as long as I have the cloud. However, that only works as long as you have an Internet connection. Mine is sporadic so purchasing one stand alone software product might work better for me....and my choices are 1) Photoshop, 2) Lightroom, OR 3) PSE

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

What sort of plug-ins were you thinking> I'm going to spend the day in a photo store tomorrow!!

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Bridge does exactly that if that's what you want. All within My Pictures, just as you are doing now. It's very UNLIKE Lightroom. Bridge is like a super high performance Windows Explorer with many more skills you can take advantage of - or skip them. I use it mostly in the same manner you do.

For example of a cool ability that it has, you can give a photo of a yellow flower you shot in Denver Colorado while on vacation in 1999 "key words" such yellow, flower, Colorado, Denver, summer, 1999, vacation, etc.

When you just want to find things that are yellow, you can type yellow into a search and that flower will show up along with people with yellow hats, yellow boots, yellow cars, and many other yellow items.

If you want to find all yellow flowers you type "yellow flowers" in and you'll get that flower along with 25 other yellow flowers you shot on different dates, different years, and maybe even yellow flowers on a dress you have in your closet.

If you search for yellow flower Colorado you'll get that yellow flower along with maybe 3 others you took while in Colorado but not necessarily just in Denver.

This makes searching for files on your hard drive into something similar to typing key words into Google to find a subject. Actually Google uses the same idea in Google Images to do searches for images you want to see. The more words you add to the search the more defined the results are. Same with Bridge.

Plus there's much more but you don't have to use the features if you don't want to. Once you start using Bridge and some of it's features you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

The Dummies thing has been an on-going series of books for probably 20 years or more and have sold hundreds of millions of copies about virtually everything. PC Computers for Dummies, DOS for Dummies, WordPerfect for Dummies, Sewing For Dummies, etc.

If I was offended by something as minor as a book title with the word Dummies in it, I'd have to consider whether I don't get out enough to hear the horrible language and graphic slurs toward people that are current street language absolutely EVERYWHERE. Feel happy that it's just Dummies. There's another line of books called "... For Idiots" and you'd probably like that even less.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

You shouldn't be worrying about plug-ins yet. You don't even know what editor you're going to be ending up with. But there are plug-ins for many things. Just type Photoshop Plug-ins into Google and you'll see what a lot of them do. Sometimes Photoshop can do what the plug-in does but the plug-in automates many of the steps to achieving the same thing with Photoshop which makes the goal happen quicker for those who haven't been using Photoshop daily for 10 years.

For example, I use Topaz ReMask for taking skies out of a cloudy day shot because I have no other day left to shoot that home during the week and there's a deadline. By swiping a blue brush along the skyline edge of a house roof and the trees sticking up around it, for example, then filling the area above the blue line with red, and leaving the area below the blue line green, you push the "calculate" button and the software calculates what to do between branches and leaves, etc. and the sky is removed so another perfect blue sky can be slipped in behind the house on a separate layer. With some contrast and brightness balancing between the two layers the sky looks like it was there all along. This can be done with Photoshop using a select tool, a refine selection tool, and erasing the sky manually but it takes extreme precision and experience with Photoshop.

Photoshop die-hards on here many times hold a rebellious attitude toward plug-ins because they would rather do it themselves rather than taking the easy way out. But I'm into fast and being productive while still accurate and plug-ins many times achieve that goal.

rpavich Loc: West Virginia

LR doesn't save. When you are done "developing" your "negatives" in the "Digital Darkroom" you "export" them as a finished product such as a jpg or tiff or whatever kind of picture file you want. Until then you are just "in the darkroom" and haven't finished your editing. All LR does is save a record of your efforts to apply to the finished product.






You might have a setting set in LR to not treat them as separate files, go into your settings>file handling>treat jpgs as separate files" setting.






Don't know, never used it.




You did.

Unless you are doing heavy duty stuff (and you aren't) then PS is overkill. If you are spending the 10.00 a month for the "photographers bundle" and it comes free anyway...then use it when you need to.



My advice?

Keep simple, use LR and learn your camera and gear.
Learn the craft of Photography, don't get into the "gotta get this gear" or "gotta get that software" mode until it's been quite a while.

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

Photoshop will do everything Lightroom will do but is much more complicated and it is a pixel manipulator where Lightroom is nondestructive. Lightroom is considered by Adobe to be "a part of" Photoshop but you would never see it in the Photoshop box. Lightroom is a cataloging and much easier way to do many of the mundane things that you would do to post process your images, many of which would never ever need to go to Photoshop. It also has the ability to catalog, make slide shows that can easily be uploaded to the web in either flash or http or to CD/DVD , Map the exact location a photo was taken on a Google Earth satellite map (using gps info in the metta data or you can drag the photos from the loop at the bottom and place them in the approximate place you shot them and LR will put the gps location in the meta data), it has an area where you can create photo books for printing and then also has a printing area so that you can set up your printers and how they interact with LR. As I said, most photos will never need Photoshop, but it can be saved to work the images that need or want that "special" touch.

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

Believe me, I'm no puritan, especially after having 5 teenage boys at home at once and the teenage girl wasn't much better with her language. Now they are adults with teenagers of their own and I just sit back and laugh. My kids were absolute ANGELS compared to the teenagers across the street from me. Even LITTLE kids have horrible language coming out of their mouths. So, OK, I'll "get over it" and get the Dummies book! HA!

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

I'm sorry but this is opinion and some untruth that has to be clarified.

First of all, Lightroom is NOT considered part of Photoshop - so that's wrong. It's a considerably cheaper, yet reasonably powerful, separate entity that attempts to do part of what the Photoshop package does without requiring one to buy Photoshop. It and Elements are handicapped packages meant to bait users into the Adobe family so they'll want to climb the ladder to full blown Photoshop where more advanced features are. That was hard to do when you could only buy software on disks. But now with the advent of Photoshop CC at $10 a month, there's no reason to handicap yourself because price differential is no more.

As far as I'm concerned, Lightroom's cataloging is am absolutely confusing travesty compared to Bridge. And the Bridge and ACR apps do everything Lightroom does, do it better, and are more advanced (if you want to use the more advanced features). ACR non-destructively works with RAW files using sidecar editing data files just like Lightroom. You have the choice of saving in any other format when you're done with ACR if you're happy with what you've done in Bridge/ACR - or you can "open file" to fire up pixel-based layering Photoshop if you want to go further.

Lightroom is not easier than Bridge/ACR unless you choose to use advanced the features Lightroom doesn't have. It's not required, the advanced features don't cause confusion, and they just sit in menus waiting for you to discover them. In fact all the same editing sliders are in ACR (and are even named the same) that are in Lightroom. The main function of Bridge is clear-cut, easy to understand, file management with lots of advanced functions above and beyond Lightroom (again, only if you want to use them) so LR certainly has no advantage there either.

Many posts come thru UHH concerning LR's cataloging because people can't figure out how to find their files, can't figure out how to backup their files or have LR track the files while on other drives, can't figure out why they imported files but can't see them or the files just vanished for no reason. Fear of file loss is the dominant emotion for newbie beginning LR users.

Bridge doesn't do that to you. If you can run Windows Explorer with copy/paste you can run Bridge too. I haven't ever seen a "HELP!" post on UHH about Bridge because it's common sense easy to use. Import or Export files? Syncronize catalogs? Bah-humbug! Just copy and paste files off of your SD card folder into a folder you created in My Pictures and they're there immediately not lost in a catalog. Grab a big folder full of files and drag it onto the icon for your external backup drive and you're done. And Bridge also does slide shows which you incorrectly stated.

Certainly you must know that Photoshop has the ability to match screen to printer profiles to make the two interact accurately, so Lightroom doesn't have a leg up there either. GPS may be an advantage but I didn't take the time to research Adobe's help forums about that. Yet I have to suspect that if $75 Lightroom got the Map module then it's in the top-dog Photoshop somewhere too or available. How many of us use GPS and mapping anyway? Especially a newbie Grandma?

Thus Lightroom is clearly a lightweight cheaper alternative to the Bridge/ACR combination that is, and has been, within the Photoshop package for quite some time. I'm not sure why LR is even included in the Photoshop CC subscription package deal. It's like a car dealership sitting a Kia Rio on the roof of a Kia Optima and trying to lease them as one vehicle.

Finally, the opinion that "most photos will never need Photoshop" is narrow minded on your part - likely based upon "most" of YOUR photos that you are easily satisfied with. I shoot and process hundreds of photos per week and every one of them ends up in Photoshop CC (previously Paintshop Pro) for touch-up using healing brush, clone tool, gamma correct of selected areas on layers, selective sharpening of specific items in the photo with the sharpening brush, dodging and burning, cropping, etc. before I flatten the file, reduce image size, and save in JPG for sending to my employer. Previously I worked them over in Lightroom, then took them into Paintshop Pro to do these functions. Now, with Bridge/ACR/Photoshop all in one, my workflow is considerably more seamless and compatibility with some third party plug-ins is no longer an issue.

I'm certainly not the only photographer using Photoshop because "most of their photos never need Photoshop" or LR would be Adobe's dominant biggest selling software and Photoshop would languish in it's shadows. The reverse is actually true.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

The Dummies book I told you about was for CS5. There has been CS6 since then. Make sure you get a Dummies book about Photoshop CC on the cloud instead of the CS versions that are sold on CD. I'm sure there are some variations and new features on cloud versions that the older ones didn't have.

As far as teen girls, I'm positive they're just as bad if not worse. I was sitting at a picnic table across from four girls about 15 to 17 years old sitting together chatting at 100mph and in 5 or 6 minutes I probably heard the F word 100 times and b*tch almost as many times. This is in public, with others and small children nearby, not just them with me only nearby.

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

Please research and get your facts straight. Adobe considers Light room to be a part of Photoshop. It actually is called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom . This is a direct quote from Adobe.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.html?promoid=KLYVM

You will note the link says Photoshop Lightroom.. Please get your facts straight before you correct someone.

And If you don't want to use Lightroom, that is your business but since you don't use it, and you are spouting suppositions and plain making stuff up, don't give nonsense to people that might be interested.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Since you decided to skim what I wrote instead of actually read, apparently you didn't catch that I DID use Lightroom (for almost 2 years) daily before moving to Photoshop CC. So I'm not making stuff up nor spouting suppositions. I'm commenting from experience with both which you apparently don't have.

Lightroom was clearly written by a whole different group of programmers and some of it has very little in common with Photoshop. If Lightroom was truly meant to be part of Photoshop, it would have a mini version of Bridge and not that convoluted mess it has for cataloging.

So they call it "Photoshop Lightroom." Whoop-de-do! They call Elements "Photoshop Elements" too but it's not Photoshop either. That's yet another product that has a different historical lineage but it's under the Photoshop name family name anyway.

Lightroom isn't as powerful as the Bridge/ACR combination. Anybody who has used both will testify to that. Elements is handicapped in some ways and isn't as powerful as Photoshop. That's the facts whether you agree or not.

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

Did you read the article by Adobe on "Photoshop Lightroom"? and have you used Lightroom 5x which is more tightly connected to both bridge and to Photoshop?. Bridge is a part of the Lightroom/ Photoshop bundle for $10 and Lightroom directly transfers edited images for additional editing into Photoshop. All I am saying is please look at the Adobe site and listen to what Adobe has to say about THEIR products and how they interface with each other.. I never said that it was as powerful as Bridge ACR you inferred that I was saying that. Get off your high horse and admit that while Bridge ACR is great for you ... it isn't for everyone. I am not forcing Lightroom on you but I am stating a fact. Adobe says Lightroom is a part of their Photoshop component. Argue with them not me. I have provided the proof from their website, I have been to their roll out meetings and am stating what they are saying about LR5... I have provided the proof.