lightroom or elements for photo editing?

[ik9000]

Can't afford full fat photoshop. Should I go for PSelements or lightroom? I thought it would be Elements, but a few places suggest lightroom instead. I thought that was for video clips, or have I misunderstood?

[Splash]

It depends on what you want to do with it, tbh. Lightroom is more about the workflow of processing digital images (ie capture and process, creating collections and the like) whereas Photoshop is more focussed on the manipulation of images. They're 2 different tools for 2 different jobs.

Why not grab a trial of each and see which works for you?

[Funkstar]

What Splash said.

If it's general touch ups, Lightroom will probably to everything that you will need and more. As a bonus, it is non-destructive, meaning it only saves the changes you make to the files, so at any time you can go back and undo those changes or re-edit and more more changes. It isn't until you export a photo do you get something you can use elsewhere with the edits in place. With Elements you would need to save a copy of the file and do version control yourself, either ending up with multiple copies or being limited to committed edits.

A trial of each is probably the right thing to do, but my recommendation would really be to get Lightroom first, then get Elements to work with along side it if you need more in depth editing and composition tools that Lightroom doesn't have.

[kalniel]

Lightroom is mostly for raw conversion/photo library management/batch editing, but I find the editing it does have is enough for 99% of what I do (mostly to do with the process - conversion, levels, corrections, cropping etc. then exporting high quality resizes). Video support was only added relatively recently, it's more about stills. A free alternative would be something like RawTherapee, but I found LR to be better.

Elements is more about actually drawing/painting stuff or making major changes to a picture - airbrushing, merging photos, layers work (Which is relatively new to Elements, I wouldn't even conisder it without this) etc. But I use GIMP instead, which is free and has more features (it's aiming at full blown photoshop).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I agree with kalniel too. A few days ago you could the Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 12 Bundle Edition for around £35,but after reading on the Amazon website that they are doing a week of software sales,beginning next week,I decided to hold off for Lightroom.

[Meatfish]

Absolutely choose Lightroom everytime for a straight photography workflow. I have been using Photoshop for 12 years and really only use it for evaluating student work these days -all of my own work goes through Lightroom (I and a photographer and photography tutor). Lightroom offers you a one program solution for the photographic workflow from importing into the computer through to outputting to web, print, book or any other need. It doesn't handle video well but does allow you to preview your video. The Adobe program for video is Adobe Premiere.