Any thoughts on this combination. People tell me depending what I do (crop, fix red eye, make colors come to life, sharpen, email/upload) that LR2 is all I need. They say unless I do serious advanced stuff, I don't need Photoshop (but I want to learn how to skin smoothing plus I like the Levels & Curves features and I'm now looking into Dodge & Burn).
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Photoshop CS4 + Lightroom 2 Good combo?
- Thread starter Razeus
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Buy Adobe Photoshop Elements. It cost less than $100 and has 90% of the features of CS4. If you find later that you really do want CS4 you can apply the price of Elements to the upgrade. Elelements has all the tools, levels, curves, adjustment layers and so on. The user interface is the same between CS4 and Elements so the hours and weeks of study transferesover pretty well
One more thing, the best way to buy Elements is to buy a Wacom "Baboo Fun" graphic tablet. The tablet costs about the same as Elements and has a copy of Elements bundled inside. (Do check that the bundled copy of Elelemnts is the current version. Lots of old stock still around.) And the Wacom upgraded to CS4 is even a better deal than going straight to Adobe.
What is the advantage of Elements over GIMP? I currently use GIMP and have considered getting Elements but I'm not sure if there is a decent enough feature set difference. I'd love to get CS4 but at $700ish it's out of my "I just want to play around" price range. Mostly curious for myself and if there isn't much difference maybe GIMP would be suitable for the OP. Although getting a free tablet with Elements might be a good incentive.
The user interface is not the same between Elements and CS4. CS4 has alot more options and gives more control for each channel than Elements.
As for as the price of the software, well, let's just say that it's not an issue.
I'm trying both CS4 and LR2 now.
In my experience, Photoshop (I use CS3) is nice to have on occasion, but for the vast majority of my photos, Lightroom is all I need. So much so that if I didn't get CS3 with a student discount a couple years ago, I wouldn't pay for it today.
LR2 is great!
I purchased LR2 and CS3 together from academicsuperstore.com (highly recommended). LR2 does 90% of the editing I need done to my pictures for my clients - and you can get plugins for things like skin smoothing and stuff. It works really good. The organizing part of LR2 is really good too and I used to use ACDSee Pro 2.5 on my pc. Once I switched to Mac and LR2, I have to say I'd recommend to anyone!
I purchased LR2 and CS3 together from academicsuperstore.com (highly recommended). LR2 does 90% of the editing I need done to my pictures for my clients - and you can get plugins for things like skin smoothing and stuff. It works really good. The organizing part of LR2 is really good too and I used to use ACDSee Pro 2.5 on my pc. Once I switched to Mac and LR2, I have to say I'd recommend to anyone!
Lightroom and Photoshop CS4 make a great combo. I've been using them as my editing duo of software since CS4 came out and been very pleased with the results 
. I used to do most of my editing in lightroom, although I find myself using photoshop more often nowadays.
. I used to do most of my editing in lightroom, although I find myself using photoshop more often nowadays.Of course they differ, otherwise they'd be the same thing.
What I meant is that nothing that you learn using Elements is wasted if you later upgrade to CS4.
Even if a program if given to you at no cost, there is still an investment required in learning. CS4 has a steep learning curve
An example is iPhoto vs. Aperture. In many why Aperture is "better" but still I would not recommend it for most people because there is a learning curve, study and reading involved where as iPhoto "just works".