Can I change my vote?

I said Lightroom should be the no-brainer option over Elements when comparing their current suggested retail prices... but I had still yet to actually try Lightroom. After giving my suggestion I figured I really should get around to trying Lightroom. So I did.

My recent Doberman puppy shots were a good test candidate, as they really pushed the requirements of post processing, being underexposed, noisy high-ISO shots of a black dog. Actually the first few were exposed correctly, but within minutes the shots started getting under exposed as the light faded, the fog thickened, and I'm sure the clouds probably got denser too. I couldn't change settings to expose correctly because the shutter speed was already as low as I could reasonably go (1/80s for a puppy is slow!), and the ISO was already as high as I could go on the 1Ds2 (1600... 3200 looks abysmal). Shots at the edge of shootable, on the edge of usable. This was my test case.

For elements, once I knew the settings from one photo to use it was a matter of repeating (with slight variations) on each image. It wasn't anything major, or much different from my usual flow, aside from some extra fill light, some extra noise reduction, and some extra slight USM after doing my super-secret-magic-sharpening (see my post processing forum Moose Peterson Sharpening post, and replace the blending mode with 'overlay', and leave the high-pass slider at 1.9, 95% of the time... actually I'm going to update that post with my latest knowledge).

Given my first half hour with the Lightroom 4.3 trial, the differences between Lightroom's RAW options and Elements' RAW options aren't as huge as I had believed. What I was lacking however was the ability to do any of the processing I normally do AFTER camera raw. Parts of what I normally did afterwards, such as curves (using a plugin, the built in Elements curves tool is useless), are available as part of RAW processing in Lightroom. But other forms of noise reduction or sharpening just aren't there... and these tools were critical for these images.

The bottom line is that it seems I get more control and options in Elements after RAW conversion, and can make the images substantially nicer. As a hobbyist, where I'm not shooting several hundred shots per event (usually... I *have*, but not often) I'd rather have the ability to edit my photos to perfection with Elements than all the wonderful batch-editing and batch-processing Lightroom can give you.

Anything you'd want to do with layers, like Denise's texture work, or the awesome frames she puts on some of her images, you'd need to do elsewhere, outside of Lightroom, so you'd still need Elements (or GIMP) anyway.

In addition, Elements has some of it's CS big brothers' features, in cut down ways. You don't have the full content-aware suite of tools, but you've got content aware healing brushes, recompose tools, and a few others. I rarely use content aware healing, but I'd probably use it more than batch processing.

I'd always looked at Lightroom as the holy-grail package everyone wants to be using, but having tried it, I preferred what I already had.