From one of my readers: Hello!
I've been a reader of your blog for at least a year. I'm also a Minnesota girl. I love looking at your photos and getting ideas and reading your tips. I'm a hobby photographer and have been taking pictures since I was a teenager (or younger). I discovered yesterday that Adobe offers student pricing (yay!) on their products and I'm interested in getting Photoshop and/or Lightroom while I can still take advantage of that. I'm trying to figure out if Photoshop and Lightroom do essentially the same things or if they're different enough that getting both of them would be worthwhile. Do you have any experience with those products or some insight that may help me decide?
Thank you so much.
Pamela
OKAY! So, here's my not so technical answer...Photoshop was designed for Graphic Artists interested in manipulating images and creating their own designs. The program did provide photographers with the same benefits but it was complicated and time consuming. (every change takes seconds and that adds up when you have thousands of pictures to edit!)
Three years ago Adobe put out Lightroom! It's a program designed for photographers. It has all the basic features for color correction, exposure compensation, image enhancement (B & W, Sepia etc.) and more. Lightroom 2 is totally worth getting! The upgraded version is awesome! The features that I used to go back to Photoshop for have now be integrated into the new version.
My recommendation is to start with Lightroom 2 and when it doesn't do what you need graphically you can purchase Photoshop and dive into the world of design. They work seamlessly together!
I hope this helps!
www.noemiphotography.com