I currently use Lightroom 3 to work on my photos. I am just curious if it is worth upgrading to Photoshop CS6 or is Lightroom sufficient for someone who like myself who is not taking professional photos. I guess I'm wondering what I am missing by not using Photoshop.
I'm the opposite; I use photoshop and not lightroom but from what I understand, lightroom is great for organizing and cataloging and working on raws but you cannot use actions and plugins to get any special effects or other finishing work. ; I could be wrong on this.
LR does have presets and if you have Topaz you can use Topaz in LR. ; I would suggest downloading the 30 day free trial of Photoshop and see if it will meet your needs. ; Or maybe even Photoshop Elements. ; Either way there is a free 30 day trial which is fully functional.
Depends of course on what you want to achieve, but Lightroom was designed to be tool that support pro photographers that wanted one package to do it all. ; Does it do everything? No, but pretty close especially with some help from some plug ins like Perfect Layers & Focal Point. ; I have also used Topaz Adjust and Perfect Effects (free). I do not use Photoshop at all. I'm sure there are some things the pros need Photoshop for, but you have to ask yourself if it is worth the price. ; If Lightroom and a plugin can do most of what you need, you probably can rely solely on the Lightroom route. As Jim said, there are many presets on the web that can be used to quickly adjust one or many images with a look you want to present. ; You can also create your own presets and apply them easily to any number of images. By the way, Lightroom 4 is out and it is even better.
i have migrated through all 4 versions of lightroom, i have cs4 and have not even opened it for use in probably the better part of a year. i have been studying scott kelby's instructional materials and have a multiseries video tutorial i purchased from luminescent landscape. i can't at present see any reason to get an upgrade for photoshop, lightroom seems to be able to do all i want, and once you start to learn about how to make presets, which function much like ps actions, processing gets much easier. plus there are a ton of free presets available on the web, and a number of plugins that are free that do many neat things such as geoencode, edit and order metadata, and many other things. i feel that unless you are in the graphic arts arena, earning money from that there is no need for a hobbyist photographer to own more than lightroom. just my 0.2 worth
90% of what I do to my pics is done in LR if that helps. ; When I need to do something that involves layers, masking or compositing, that's when I go to photoshop.
I do most of my editing in Aperture, basically the same toolset as LR. I like the combination of a program that does both editing and cataloging. For most people the full Photoshop is overkill. Erich
