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Hi John, thanks for your comment.

If you’re shooting 1000 – 2000 images at a time I would certainly suggest a program like Lightroom. Lightroom is designed to help you organize your images by event and gives you the ability to add/edit metadata to make it easy for searching. When I say process, lets say your white balance was off a bit in your original RAW images. Instead of tweaking them one at a time you could balance one image and apply that setting to all of the images from that game. This is just one small example of what Lightroom can do, there are many, many, many advantages to using a program like Lightroom that will help you perfect your images and streamline your workflow. If you were only shooting an handful of images at a time I would say stick with whatever is working for you now, but with 1000 – 2000 images an event, Lightroom or Aperture (if you are working on a Mac) is the way to go.

As for CS5, if you are just working with images and not doing video production or graphic design, then there is no need to buy one of the full creative suite editions. I would suggest getting the standalone version of Photoshop CS5. It will give you the ability to do amazing things with your images. I wouldn’t spend the extra money on Photoshop CS5 Extended as it includes a lot of extra features that you as a photographer will never use. That said, if you don’t do a lot of editing, manipulation and compositing of your images, I don’t think I would spend the money on Photoshop either. It’s an expensive program and it may be more than what you need. Another option would be Photoshop Elements. It’s about $100 and gives you a base set of features from the full version of Photoshop.

If budget is a concern (and who isn’t it for these days) I would just purchase Lightroom 3. It’s an amazing application used by advanced and pro shooters worldwide and will really help you take your photography to the next level. Check out Adobe’s website at http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/ to learn more about Lightroom and check out NAPP’s new Lightroom 3 Learning Center http://www.photoshopuser.com/lightroom3/ for some great tutorials.

Hope this helps and if you have any other questions let me know.

Trevor