Elements or Lightroom ?

[mfosteri]

I'm a novice photographer looking to get into professional people portraits, etc... My brother in law recomended Elements, so I bought PS Elements 12. Would Lightroom be a better choice. I don't see many touchup options on Elements ie. skin touchups, etc... I think I might be able to return to Best Buy. Not sure. Any suggestions anyone??

[tirediron]

Apples and oranges! Lightroom is a cataloguing and raw processing application. It is a non-desctructive editor (that is, you make no changes to the image, rather all of your "edits" are written to an .xml file which the application parses and then applies your desired changes on that). It is an excellent application and one which, IMO, no photographer, regardless of caliber should be without, BUT... (there's always that damn, 'but', isn't there?) it is not the be-all, end-all. Lightroom is outstanding for doing things like colour, white-balance and exposure correction, including an excellent localized brush, but it lacks tools such as cloning, layers, and masks which are equally important. The short answer is: You really need both.

While I realize the intital outlay is rather spendy, until the end of this year, Adobe has a Creative Cloud "special offer" for photographers. For anyone with a valid standard license for CS 3 or later, you can opt in to Creative Cloud and get CS and LR for $10/month. Of course this means shelling out for a full-blown copy of Photoshop, but, it's a long-term investment.

[RuthCrawford]

One thing to think about is that adobe sells annual PSE updates only as stand-alone these days, while Lightroom still has upgrade prices. Therefore, if you, as a rule, update, the longer-term cost of a light room is much closer to the PSE