gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

I started with PS Elements 11 and now have Elements 14. All self-taught and YouTube. Very intuitive, three modes from beginner to expert. The cataloguing system is great once you get the feel for it. Does everything I need to do and way more. As long as you're PC literate and understand how a database works you shouldn't have any problems with tagging and finding your photos. I work with everything on the hard drive after I put my originals on separate external drives. Backups using PSE also go to an external drive. When I upgraded to a new PC I went to Elements 14 at the same time. I did a full backup from PSE 11 to an external drive and had no problems recovering it to the new computer with PSE 14.

I'm not a pixel peeper, I just like being able to make my photos look good to me.

RickL Loc: Vail, Az

You should look at Affinity. It is an even competitor to photoshop and Lightroom for a onertime cost of 49.95

wapiti Loc: round rock, texas

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

You don't need to use the stuff in Ps, Lr, or PSE that does not interest you. In fact with out effort or instruction you probably will not find it. I use Ps CS6 as a hobbyist photographer and I never touch the graphic design tools in it to any real extent. I have no idea how to even draw a cube or sphere with Ps, and don't really care. If I wanted to go into that I'd probably be better off with Auto-Cad as I do struggle to at times to design projects for the house, floor plans, gates, fences, repairs, gadgets, etc. that I have no idea how to begin with Ps. Basically Ps along with Topaz and Nik does for me what I need with out playing with "toys". At the time I was able to buy one of the last (as it turned out) copies of Ps CS6 Expanded as a physical DVD-ROM with an educational discount. And I'm glad I did. Someday I may go to the Monthly Fee CC version.

Why switch cameras if you love the results. ??? GAS thing?

(Hope this does not bring up the GAS related thing that), some people are camera users and other people are photographers.

willmscr Loc: Beloit Wisconsin

I consider myself to be an amateur at both photography and post processing, an advanced amateur in the former. I tried the trial version of PS and found the user interface to be non-intuitive. This is a significant statement because I spent me entire career in technology and have been able to adapt to the changes over 50 years quite easily. I used the trial version of Affinity Photo and found it to be the exact opposite, easy to use. Now, this is an entirely personal preference and you should try anything that anyone suggests to see how well it works for you.

What I can say in response to the computer question is that old computers will not work well with most of the modern post processing tools. They are very memory intensive and some of them are very CPU intensive as well. Check out the minimum specifications for whatever program you decide to use and then up your configuration significantly. I have a tablet/laptop that meets the minimum for Affinity and it works. I upgraded to a laptop with twice the memory and a faster CPU and am much happier with the performance.

Ricinus Loc: Leduc Alberta

PSE for me. Lots of help videos on YouTube..

Mike

ronsphotos

Thanks Mike

joer Loc: Colorado/Illinois

Light Room is definitely worth learning. Amateurs often are smarter than professionals because they know better to try and make a living in such a competitive and waning business.

I have no patience at all and it gave me no trouble.

mattijaffe

Explore nik by Google. PS embeds it into their package. It is free to download and use. lots of guidance videos on u tube. I use it with elements 15 (cheap) and this combination addresses all my needs. Enjoy.

don26812 Loc: South Bay of Los Angeles, CA

You may want to check out some other recent threads here on Hedgehog. There have been lots of good comments on the general subject of what photo editor to buy.

Scharlene

Amateur here, too. I use Paint Shop Pro. It's pretty easy but still has a lot of things you can do with it.

joseph premanandan

you might consider using lightroomCC and it is workflow related.it is easy to learn.there are excellent videos on lightroom editing by Anthony Morganti.good luck

Keith Parris Loc: Texas

Photography has been one of my hobbies for more than 50 years. About seven or eight years ago I began practicing digital rather than film photography with a consumer grade Kodak digital camera that I wore out. With a desire to expand my photography above consumer grade, I purchased a Nikon D750 what Nikon calls an enthusiast digital single-lens reflex. I wanted the full-frame digital sensor and the D750 was on sale. I am contemplating the possibility of selling some of my photographic work.

Shortly after getting the consumer grade Kodak digital camera, I began using Picasa. This served my purpose for two or three years until I was introduced to ACDSee Pro 7. The additional functionality and ease of use of ACDSee Pro 7 helped expand my photography. I have upgraded to ACDSee Pro 8 and currenty have ACDSee Pro 9. https://www.acdsee.com/en/index This software is frequently available on sale, and I just noticed that they offer a plan to compete with Adobe Creative Cloud.

When I began using my Nikon D750, I captured images in jpg format while learning my new camera. I captured images in both jpg and RAW formats for a brief period of time. Now I capture images in RAW format only because I can export from RAW format to jpg after post processing is complete.

About a year or so ago, I began subscribing to Adobe Creative Cloud / Photography. Yes there is a fairly steep learning curve even though I worked with computers in the high-tech electronics industry for more than 30 years. I finished an Adobe Lightroom continuing education course (five class periods each three hours long) at a local two-year college a couple of weeks ago. This coming week I begin an Adobe Photoshop continuing education course (seven class periods each three hours long) at the same college. I am just beginning to get comfortable using Lightroom and Photoshop.

ACDSee Pro provides a significant level of functionality that is easy for an amateur photographer to use. I still use ACDSee Pro because it feels much easier to enter additional data such as keywords, copyright notices, etc. into the metadata. Verify that your computer exceeds the minimum requirements for this software.

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

buldog216 Loc: Boynton Beach, Florida

I've been using PS for many years now. THe you tube videos are great, I still use them to polish up some of the things I seem to have forget after my 2 mini strokes. I am now using CS 5, haven't yet seen the need to update it yet. My computer is a quad core 64 bit with 8 gigs of ram and two external drives for photo storage.