June 10, 2010 – Adobe is offering a great deal, get 30% off Lightroom 3 when purchased with Creative Suite 5 edition, Photoshop CS5 or Photoshop CS5 Extended. The 30% discount is available on the full or upgrade versions of Lightroom 3 and valid when purchasing the full or upgrade versions of CS5, Photoshop or Photoshop Extended. Here’s a link to view Adobe’s discount software deals.
–
*The Current Photographer website contains links to our affiliate partners. Purchasing products and services through these links helps support our efforts to bring you the quality information you love and there’s no additional cost to you.
Founder of Current Photographer, co-host of The Digital Photography Cafe Show, Designer, Photographer, and overall tech geek.
Trevor –
You were kind enough to respond to my tweet regarding whether or not I needed both CS5 and LR with the following: @Defender13 You really only need LR if you process large amounts of images. For the most part Photoshop can do what you need.
I shoot Canon RAW and can go through a 1000 shots for a hockey game and around 2000 for an air show. When you say “process”, what exactly do you mean? I don’t tweak my photos too much and most of what I need to do seems to be available in DPP, Canon’s product.
Would you be so kind as to tell me how I would benefit from LR and/or CS5? The one thing I am interested in is being able to add/edit metadata for possible sales. Any thoughts that you or your other readers would care to share would be greatly appreciated.
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
That’s exactly what I was looking for Trevor! I think I’ll start with Lightroom and go from there. I did use their 30 day free trial for LR2 and was amazed at some of the things I could do. 30 days is just enough time to tease you though… Thanks again.