Lightroom 5 or Photoshop Elements or ???

[bbrown]

My wife's birthday is coming up and I was looking at getting her one of these. She has a pretty decent camera set up (or at least it was a couple years ago when I bought it for her) - its a Canon DSLR with several lenses. She not a professional but does a lot of family type pictures and portraits, takes a bunch of pictures from our outdoors adventures and is even going to take pictures for a friend's wedding this summer. She has messed with some basic photo editing software but its all been freebie stuff and I figured she would really enjoy having more options.

I was originally looking at Lightroom 5 but after doing some digging its sounds like it might be a bit complicated for starters. She definitely is not computer illiterate but she's no Bill Gates either - hehe.

Basically I know nothing about this type of stuff but looking thru lots of peoples pictures on here its obvious that some of you are very good and must be much more familiar with whats best.
Thanks

 

[bbrown]

Anyone used one of these or hopefully more than one have any insight? Thanks!

 

[Matt Cashell]

I use elements, but will be adding Lightroom soon. I think they go great together. I.e. Lightroom for "developing" raw files and pse for special effects.

 

[Wrench77]

I just got Lightroom 5 a couple of weeks ago. I watched a few YouTube videos that covered the basics. I am definitely still learning, but so far I am really pleased with the results I'm getting. I can process a photo now without getting to crazy in just a couple of minutes and I know as I learn more they will only get better. I have been working with my existing jpeg photos and now I shoot in Raw so I know that will help also. Here's a few pictures below before and after.

 

[Rent Outdoor Gear]

I'm new to Lightroom and really like it both as a photo editor and as an archival tool. It has a lot of functionality for cataloguing tagging and searching your archives. Gets to be important when you have tens if thousands of photographs. I still utilize photoshop for certain editing tasks because the toolset there is more robust, but Lightroom covers all of the basic exposure adjustments very nicely. It can also automate a lot of the repetitive tasks which can save oodles of time. You might want to consider a subscription to creative cloud which will give you access to a ton of other great software as well.

 

[bbrown]

Thanks for the feed back and nice pics Wrench.
Sounds like Lightroom may be the way to go and maybe I will even sit down and learn it with her. Thanks again!

 

[charvey9]

PSE is good value option. I used it for years in photo editing. The organizer is also very useful.

However, you can also get a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud and get the full Photoshop. I think the price was $19.99/mo for a single program, and it is always up to date. I subscribe to all the programs for $49.99/mo, which is really nice if you ever want to get into video editing also.

 

[Travis Bertrand]

I really like Lightroom, if you buy more presets, it becomes a very versatile tool.