In 2008, my wonderful husband gave me the most incredible gift which has truly enlightened my life. It was my Canon DSLR. You were expecting me to say my daughter right? It was actually a double gift since I actually got the camera for being such an awesome preggo mom. But this camera has opened up my eyes to parts of the world that we often fail to stop long enough to notice in everyday life.
Part of becoming a great photographer is knowing how to use the lighting around you. But sometimes you don’t get to select the perfect setting for the excitement of life, making it necessary to do a bit of retouching to make your photos better. And other times, you just want to play with a totally different look (black & white, washed out, vibrant, etc) which can be done very easily with both of these programs.
Some of the most popular products to do this with are Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom. Do you need both of them? Absolutely not but they are both nice to have if you can swing it.
Photoshop Lightroom 3
Price: $299 for full version or $99 for upgrade
Lightroom is a software I am still exploring every day which is ideal for photographers who want to shoot in RAW format (not all software can read the large photo files as well as jpg, etc.) It can also help you streamline your processing times and if you work with RAW files, you will be able to make significant changes to the look of the photo (like making light corrections) that you would need hours to achieve in Photoshop (not to mention a huge manual).
In Lightroom, you must first import your photos into the software, but any changes you make can be redone at any time in the future. So you never destroy your original — and if you go backwards but later decide to go forwards again, you can do that too.
One thing I really like about Lightroom is that the exporting features allow you to easily and quickly resize, optimize and watermark your images in one go. Or you can always use a free tool to resize images if you don’t have access to Lightroom. Yes, you can do all of those things in Photoshop, but if you’ll have to create an action to do it all seamlessly, which is a bit more of a pain. (Don’t worry if you have no idea what all that means. I’ll be happy to go into how to use both of these pieces of software in the future.)
Photoshop CS5
Price: $199 to upgrade (Right now, you can save an save an additional 20% off the standard upgrade price when you upgrade to CS5.5 from a qualifying Adobe product. Offer ends January 31.)
Photoshop is a great tool for editing photos but it has far more capabilities than that. You can also create logos, backgrounds, collages and much more. There are a few features built into Photoshop which let you make simple adjustments (like tone, contrast and color) and you can also purchase or find free Actions which will help you to create great weathered, black and white, and other effects on your images.
The Photoshop I grew up with and have used the last 10 years has significantly changed over the last couple of years. And now it has the capability to remove some objects in the background, to smoothly cut people out of a photo and put them behind a new background (with way less effort than in the past), and in their extended version, you can even do 3D imaging. But really, the latter isn’t intended for photographers but web designers, video professionals and the like.
Final Thoughts
If I had to choose one of these products, I would likely have to choose Photoshop because of its versatility. As I mentioned, you can do far more than just touching up photos a little bit. Actually, you can touch up photos A LOT and make people look thinner, fatter, prettier, have different colored hair and so on. That one piece of software is what makes most of the people in magazines look as hot as they do.
Lightroom is really geared for professional photographers (not that there is anything wrong with that). But I personally just don’t have a use for some of the features in the software.
In the future, I’ll try to go into these two software options a bit further — and explore Photoshop Elements, the everyday option for individuals who don’t need the full gamut of options. Pick up a Photoshop Elements 10 & Premiere Elements 10 – License for just $150 and also gain the capability to create and edit PDF files.
Check out the current Adobe Special Offers for discount information.
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