ariana says:

Jules, that’s a tough one. It sort of depends on how many pictures you take really. The thing about lightroom is that you can perform the same action on a whole set of photos like say change the white balance, or apply a vignette, or lighten up the skin tones in one fell swoop. It has cut down the time I spend in photoshop so much.. which is good and bad, because I love to fiddle in photoshop, but like you I’m indecisive! So I could spend hours on one photo and then what about the other ones I like from that shoot? I can drag and drop adjustment layers from one to the other but it ends up taking me forever.

Lightroom is just so practical for importing, organizing, editing and exporting lots of image etc. But if you aren’t taking tons of pictures all the time and just want to be able to use a few actions I’d say CS4.

To answer your questions about lightroom, there aren’t “actions” but there are “presets” which are very similar (but maybe not as abundantly available as PS actions).

I think again it’s all about volume. If you handle tons of images all the time and need a great tool to edit AND organize then lightroom. Oh, and also it’s really designed to be a RAW image editor, even though it can do JPGs. I just wanted to throw that out there because I don’t know what kind of camera you have or if you shoot in RAW.

Better yet, why not download the free trials of both and see which you like?

ariana says:

MrsTotty, are you Totty from the nest (bump?) OK, so I have elements installed on my computer but have never really used it. I just looked it over and at first glance you should be able to do everything I’ve talked about in my tutorials thus far. It’s going to give you a lot of functionality for the money. The only area I think it will be limiting eventually is if you want to use free or paid “actions”. So like the Pioneer woman actions I blogged about are free and wonderful, but they only work with Photoshop and not Elements. But for everything else I think Elements will probably give you more than what you need!

Jbhat, anytime you are in NY I’d be thrilled to take your portraits :)

Marybeth, thanks! Its funny because those actually ARE Jasper’s PJs and I was just thinking if people notice that he’s ALWAYS in those (he was in the same ones for the military crawl video).

I’m glad you like the photo details.. I figured I like to see them so if I include them other people might find them useful too.

Angie, ack, you caught me! I’m going to try to work up a new one for this week. The truth is I’ve become obsessed with Adobe Lightroom lately for editing and haven’t being paying as much attention to photoshop, but now that I know someone cares I’ll put my thinking cap on and get to work on a new tutorial!