First, as an aside, I'm growing very tired of Apple fanatics calling for the death of Adobe. I can't help but come to the conclusion that these are people who actually do not interact with the company or its products at ALL from a creator perspective.
Well I haven't seen any of that on
this thread, but I'm not exactly willing to give Adobe a pass on things like Flash... Or the way they cut off camera raw support for previous versions that force you onto their upgrade bandwagon. (FWIW,
has been doing the same thing lately with Aperture and it's camera raw updates.)
That said, this video just enforces some of the exciting things coming out of Adobe labs! I'm very, very excited about CS5 for photographers. It's a huge jump. This body/lens profiling already existed from a French company that creates custom RAW conversion software, but it's nice to see it easily integrated with Adobe products.
I've been using DxO for about a year. It's actually a very good product in terms of lens corrections, fixes for chromatic aberration, sharpening, etc. But the workflow is convoluted, and the updates to the Mac version have been slow to arrive and the dates regularly slip (v. 6 for Mac has been promised at the end of '09, 1st Qtr '10, Spring '10, May '10...)
The biggest potential advantage that I can see is that the Adobe version will allow you to generate (and share)
your own lens correction profiles; anyone who has waited for DxO to get around to supporting a particular lens/camera combination knows how frustrating this can be.
I hope the new lens distortion option has also been upgraded in Photoshop: Filters: Lens Distortion.
The word is that the new lens correction process will be much more sophisticated -- easier to automate based on individual lens correction profiles and the EXIF data from your image (i.e. batch processing, processing on import, etc.)
I was thinking of buying SC4 Extended (student, faculty, & staff version), but now Lightroom looks real nice. Which in your view would be better for me? This is what I do: I use PSE8 to PP RAW and other photos, and it does a good job considering that it's relatively low-priced. I don't work with 3D files, so I don't need the Extended version.
For what most people do (myself included) Lightroom is going to have 90% of what you need. Unless you regularly do the type of PP that is Frankie's trademark or plan to use Photoshop on a professional basis, I'd go with Lightroom 3 when it ships, and keep using PSE 8 until you hit a hurdle that Elements can't clear.
Already I've been reading that there may be some issues with Photoshop CS4 directly editing Lightroom 3 files; this might require a somewhat kludgy export to an intermediate PSD or TIFF. (See my gripe above.) Before you buy an educational version of CS4, verify that you'll be able to get a free update to CS5 when it ships. Otherwise wait for the CS5 versions to hit the academic channels.
