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Recession Digital Darkroom
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During tough financial times, everyone is looking for ways to cut their budgets and save money. In a modern digital darkroom, Adobe Photoshop can be an expensive luxury. A lot of photographers use less than 10% of its tools and capabilities. As a matter of fact, most professional photographers send their work out to be retouched instead of doing it themselves. Those that work on their own images can probably be served just as well by using Photoshop Elements and/or Adobe Lightroom.
Let's take a look at what tools a digital photographer needs
- Image Browsing and sorting
- Raw processing capability
- Color correction
- Image cleanup
- Layered editing
- Masking and selection tools
Photoshop Elements can do all the above and more. With the addition of Adobe Bridge as part of elements 6 for Mac and 7 for Windows, elements becomes a powerful digital darkroom.
Lightroom can do everything except layers but it handles image editing a little differently by working in a non-destructive manner. In prepping images for delivery to advertising agencies and magazines, 99% of the time my company handles all corrections and image touch ups in Lightroom.
There are other options for viewing and editing images on a budget but Elements and Lightroom are compatible with Photoshop which is where almost all images end up eventually for final retouching and/or printing. This means that any changes or edits you make will be carried across all three programs.
Photoshop is a very complex program that handles everything from retouching and special effects to heavy compositing. If you are a designer there probably isn't any way around paying for Photoshop but if you are a photographer, you might think about why you need the added expense and complexity of tools you will probably never use.
$399-$899 to upgrade Adobe Creative suite
