sandiegosteve Loc: San Diego, CA

Lots of descriptions.

Lightroom is a personal digital asset management system. You can load all of you images, organize buy folders and tag them. Why? To find later or to execute your workflow to process images for a customer. (customer may be your friends for free).

Lightroom also allows you to do some edits to the images. These can be pretty complex exits. The nice thing is that you don't edit the actual image, but a virtual copy and you don't destroy anything.


So, it is a collection manager and a way to edit images to get the look you want.

It is super popular, so there are a lot of great tutorials.

vcmestimator Loc: Yuba City, CA

If you decide to use any software for post production of your photos, be sure to check out YouTube. There are videos on how to do most anything with the various products. It is how I learned to use both lightroom and photoshop. (Still Learning)

George

Gideon144 Loc: Denver, Colorado

Thank you everyone,
Lightroom is a computer program that helps organize and adjust photos.
The plan is to decide between subscription and one time expense. I like George 's suggestion to watch You Tube instruction videos. It appears we will need a good computer with huge hard drive. Will be saving for that, maybe can purchase around July.

Gideon144 Loc: Denver, Colorado

My first camera had manual mode only. The camera had a meter which required one to aim at the part of the scene that was desired to use for setting exposure values. I became fairly skilled at determining camera settings, as I couldn't afford wasting exposures. Then I married and immediately became poor. Then came children. Long story short I am nearing retirement seeing an opportunity for having time for taking photos again. I don't imagine having resources to try different photo set-ups, so I'm exerting myself to become familiar with current equipment. Enough of my story. We purchased a Nikon Cool pix and learned much. We now have a Nikon D3400 that I am calling a "good " Point and shoot. It takes raw, but presently have nothing to accommodate the large files.

Gideon144 Loc: Denver, Colorado

[quote=Gideon144]Dear friends,
My first camera had manual mode only. The camera had a meter which required one to aim at the part of the scene that was desired to use for setting exposure values. I became fairly skilled at determining camera settings, as I couldn't afford wasting exposures. Then I married and immediately became poor. Then came children. Long story short I am nearing retirement seeing an opportunity for having time for taking photos again. I don't imagine having resources to try different photo set-ups, so I'm exerting myself to become familiar with current equipment. Enough of my story. We purchased a Nikon Cool pix some years ago and learned much. We now have a Nikon D3400 that I am calling a "good " Point and shoot. It takes raw as well as jpegs, but presently have nothing to accommodate the large raw files.

Thanks for your comments, suggestions and help.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Get at least a 256GB SSD rather than a hard drive. It SUPERCHARGES your computer. (You can always connect external storage of just about any type.)

Also, get a minimum of 16GB RAM and an i7 processor. Don't skimp on the monitor, and DON'T think you can get by without a real hardware/software calibration kit from either X-Rite or DataColor, unless the monitor comes with it. Adjusting images in Lightroom is crazy stupid without one.

Gideon144 Loc: Denver, Colorado

Thank you for the list.