gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Since they're Adobe products Element's catalogue and tagging are similar to LR. Once you get the concept, it works quite well, for me at least.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Actually, Elements is a "lite" version of BOTH Photoshop and Lightroom.

Elements is designed to be a reasonably comprehensive, all-in-one program... handling all aspects from sorting and archiving through conversions, editing, retouching and finishing images.

Lightroom and Photoshop are designed to work together and complement each other. Some people only use one or the other, but they actually aren't intended to be used separately.

Lightroom is primarily a high volume, organizer and cataloger... And is a "batch RAW converter" with relatively crude, "light" image editing tools. It's not designed or intended to fully finish images to a high degree.

Photoshop is a low volume image editor and optimizer... It's built to fully finish individual images to a very high degree, but has very little cataloging and archiving capability.

Elements is not as full featured as either LR or PS... It's far less complex and easier to use (particularly compared to Photoshop, which is the "Mac Daddy" of all image editing and optimization programs).

Unless you are a professional or very advanced amateur, Elements is likely to be able to handle all you need. It's sold only as a perpetually licensed program. You might hear that Elements is an "8-bit limited" program, but that's a bit misleading. If you are working on a RAW image in Elements, that's done in 16-bit mode until you go to save the finished image.... when you can only save in an 8-bit format. This is actually all that's needed most of the time... even what's required for many printing processes or online display and sharing of your images.

The Lightroom/Photoshop combo use the same Adobe Camera Raw engine and work done on RAW files with it is also done in 16-bit mode, which is important in these stage of the process to make the best quality adjustments..... but with these you also can save a 16-bit file such as a TIFF or PSD, which might be needed for some commercial purposes, particularly if further work will be done on the image by someone else. You also can save an 8-bit JPEG or GIF (and most people will probably do so 95% to 98% of the time) from these programs. With PS you also can save CMYK and some other color spaces that are specifically for commercial printing processes... That's not possible with Elements.

By all means, experiment with the Lightroom trial if you wish.... One suggestion, before you download it and start the trial, invest in one of the "how to" books (by Scott Kelby or other). Read that and have it on hand, so you don't spend a lot of time stumbling around trying to figure out how LR works and get the best use of the trial period. PS and LR don't have any sort of built in support for new users, the way Elements does.

While LR is fairly complex, one or two books or one or two classes can get most people up to speed using it. Not so with PS... it's far more complex and might take a year's worth of classes and a stack of books to learn to use really well and fully.

Lightroom is still being sold as a perpetually licensed version (LR6), but also is offered via subscription (LR CC). It doesn't matter if you download the software for the trial. But you'll need to choose between the two purchase methods if you decide to keep using LR at the end of the trial... perpetual license for about $140... or subscription for $10 a month when you prepay a year (subscription includes both LR CC and PS CC).

Photoshop is now ONLY offered via subscription (PS CC).

Elements is typically upgraded with a new version annually.... usually in Sept./Oct. There may be some minor updates throughout the year, but the bulk of new features and compatibility with the latest camera models is held for the annual release, which usually sells for about $100 at introduction, but seems to drop significantly in price over the course of the year. Unless you need one of the new features a new version offers, or upgrade to a new camera model that's not supported in the earlier version, you could continue to use an older version of Elements as long as you like.

Photoshop has historically seen new version upgrades approx. every three years, with numerous minor updates in between. Lightroom saw more frequent upgrade versions initially, every year or two, but now seems to be on a longer version life cycle. Until LR6, Lightroom had never been offered with a cheaper upgrade version. The only choice was a full version. But with LR6 there was a cheaper $99 upgrade offered for users of LR4 or LR5 (though Adobe did a pretty good job hiding the upgrade.... whether that was intentional or not, I don't know). When it was still offered with perpetual license, Photoshop the initial purchase price was steep (about $650-$750), but after that the price could be managed to significant extent by upgrading to every other new version (upgrades cost about $200-$250). Using PS since verson 4 in the mid-1990s, and LR since it was first introduced in 2006, I estimate my cost to upgrade worked out about the same as the current subscription costs: approx. $360 every three years. Now with the CC versions of both, upgrades are a thing of the past. They are even "pushed out" and installed automatically in some cases.

Which brings me to a recent problem I had with LR6.... I'd gotten notification of a significant update, but was holding off because I was in the middle of a job sorting and cataloging 5000 images from a shoot. Well, about 2/3 the way through the work, one day last week I found my computer had restarted. At first I blamed my cat, who's been known to climb onto the computer, stepping on the power button and causing it to shut down. But it was odd that it had done a restart.... then when I went to use LR6 to continue my work, I found a new version had installed. That really pissed me off! Although none of the work I'd done was lost, a number of my settings and preferences in LR were gone... All my added plug-ins had disappeared, too. So I had to take time to reset and reinstall things, then have LR "relearn" some of my workflow. The new version runs a little faster and has some new features... but I really don't like to have my work interrupted. That's one of the reasons I choose NOT to subscribe to the LR/PS package... I need to be in charge of my software and not subject to Adobe's whims installing new versions at their convenience, not mine.

fishone0 Loc: Kingman AZ

I use both and like them both from Lightroom you can go to Elements to finish up editing on the photo if you wish

Yaro Loc: Surfside, Florida

I started as an Elements user but the main reason I decided to give Lightroom a try is because of its batch processing abilities. In Elements, you have to apply your changes to each individual photo. Lightroom allows you to apply changes in mass, which gets 80% of your editing done for you effortlessly. It's a real time saver if you shoot hundreds of photos in the same lighting, or even 10 photos. Lightroom handles most of my editing needs so I don't need to go into Elements that often, but it's always good to know that it's there for any detailed work that may need to be done to your photo.

veezee Loc: CT

I started using Elements and changed to Lightroom so have used both, although I will admit to not using Elements since version 12, and I am sure it has more features than when I last used it.

In addition to what others have said, I feel that LR has a better system for organizing your images. The batch processing for keywords, face recognition, ratings, and other meta data is a time saver. One frustration I had with Elements is the catalog would only recognize one of the images if you happened to have files with the same name. With LR you can have duplicate names (same or different image) in different folders and LR will recognize them.

As with Photoshop, Elements makes permanent changes to your images. If you want to keep a copy of the original, You either have to save the edited version to a new file, or use layers to preserve the original image. LR is non-destructive. The edits you make are not applied directly to your image, rather LR is a database that keeps a record of the edits you make. Thus you can always change your edits or revert back to the original. You can also make virtual copies (a separate file is not stored on your disk, LR just stores a second set of edits). Your edits are not permanently to your images, but applied to a COPY when you export to a hard drive, CD/DVD, or email. You can also publish your images to many services, such as Facebook, SmugMug, etc. (no copies are put on your hard drive, and you can modify you image in LR and republish any time).

If you want to group images together from various folders, you don't have to move or copy the image files. You can organize your images into virtual Collections without moving or copying any files.

LR will save you lots of disk space because you do not have to save multiple versions of images. You will only need to save the images you edit with Elements, Photoshop, or other processing tools. When you export jpegs or tiff files to share with others, you can even delete those once you are done with them because you can quickly export them again.

You can do 90-95 percent of your processing within Lightroom, which once you learn it I think is easier to use than Elements. There are excellent courses on Udemy.com (wait for $10 sales). I think this one is the best: https://www.udemy.com/master-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-cc-from-beginner-to-advan/learn/v4/t/lecture/3458012?start=0. There are multitudes of free You-tube videos and many, many good books as well. To make the most of your 30 day trial, I would suggest you check out some classes, You-tube videos, or Adobe training first.