Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Hi all,

I am getting a new pc and so decided it might be a good time to upgrade from Photoshop CS2 to CS5. I noticed that you get a bit of a discount when you also buy Lightroom.

I've never used Lightroom - I'm wondering whether people on the board tend to use both or one or the other- and if so, why both? From what I've read, Lightroom is a great app for organizing photos- but it also allows one to do quite a bit of processing as well.

Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

-J

Once you start using it, its difficult to ever stop.

A very functional tool on its own, but it increases your workflow with processing photos immensely. In tandem with the CS5 suite, Photoshop, its amazing.

Going from CS2 to CS5 is a big jump You'll love it.

Much to J's comment, they are a fantastic tandem!
Light Room also has this wonderful integration with social websites allowing you to publish to them without ever having to store separate files and upload manually.

It is true though, once you start using it, you may never stop!

I have CS4 and didn't upgrade because the cost to do so was 33% of the cost of the program - for small incremental improvement. So I decided to buy Lightroom instead since it's upgrade fee is a fraction of photoshop's. I love LR and I do almost everything in LR. I do very little in CS4 and see no reason to upgrade PS to CS5. You might want to get LR and forget about Photoshop. You already have CS2 what do you need CS5 if you have LR?

Thanks everyone. I ordered both- I ordered from B & H- and Lightroom was only $125 more, so I couldn't really pass it up.

I know of a number of features that have come out over the years (since CS2) that I would definitely use- so an upgrade of PS was definitely something I wanted to do.

I expect that I will use PS less as I get to know Lightroom, but my understanding was that certain things you still need to do in PS. Perhaps if I was more familiar with Lightroom, I might have been happy just with Lightroom... I'll give it a whirl in any event. Perhaps this will be the last version of PS that I ever buy... .

I used to run everything through Photoshop, then I got Lightroom 1.4 and found it extremely helpful, especially when it comes to processing RAW photo WB from one environment setting to another in the same shoot. Once I learned how much time Lightroom could save me, I actually spent more time getting it right in camera: ensuring composition; extra shots to avoid closed eyes; and anything else that could prevent me from needing Photoshop. Now with the latest version of Lightroom using its version of layering for treatments ... I almost never open up CS5.

I still however do use CS5 for closed eyes, and green screen effects, and of course content aware effect (talk about another time saver) on regular photos (non graphic art type work), but it literally works out to 1 photo for every 250+.

It really depends on who you are and the way you work (not that I'm disparaging Lightroom, or Aperture for that matter, I have both).

I do photo editing as part of my job and while I've tried LR (& Ap), I found I'm spending too much time in the above programs, compared to my average time of less than one minute per image I spend in Photoshop, thanks to my custom actions.

Now the images I produce are for an online catalogue, and they are low resolution (mostly using the "low" or "medium" settings of "Save for Web"), so I'm not producing works of art. It's cropping, resizing, the odd cloning, watermarking, and saving.

I admit for my own stuff I do take my time per image, but I still prefer working in Photoshop, and don't even bother with its RAW processor (forgot its name, that's how little I bother with it).