Buying Lightroom 5

andrewk · 2013-09-23T14:21:52+0100

At the moment, I use mostly PSE8 photo editing and am quite happy doing that. I am, though, considering buying Lightroom 5.x mainly because folks keep telling me that they use it for all their photo editing, so being a sheep maybe I should consider using it for mine. A couple of questions for those who use Lightroom (esp with Elements) ....... 1) Although I am not into compositing as a rule, I do want to keep the option to do stuff like swapping in a new sky. Can I successfully use PSE8 as an external editor with Lightroom or do I really need a later version (if so, why)? Does it work well? When Lightroom fires up an external editor, will it be a 16bit or 8bit image that is passed to PSE? Are there any 'gotchas' I need to know about? 2) I use DSCL to produce 16'x12' (usually) prints for camera club competitions. Before saving a JEPG to upload to DSCL, I convert the output profile to suit DSCL's printers and the paper/ink they use. I do this in Rawtherapee, because PSE will only do the conversion when printing to a local printer. I know it's only a few key presses in CS6, but it's way too expensive to buy just for that reason - will Lightroom do output profile conversions and allow a JPEG to be saved with a custom profile? Andrew