PC upgrade - what software upgrade?

Anvh........" As for elements vs lightroom
Elements is a pixel editor and lightroom an raw converter, 2 very different things. "

So when you make changes however big or small in Lightroom what is it you are changing / editing if it's not pixels ?

Anvh......."If you want to adjust the brightness, contrast, whitebalance and make your photos black and white, add some vignetting effects and add some noise to make them look old or... clean up all the photo defects by removing noise and dust on the photo then programs like ligtroom are designed to do specficly that.
Elements can also do that but if you need to do that with more then 10 photos then i'm 100% sure lightroom is a better investment. "

What was elements designed for then ? The clue might be in the name I guess " Photoshop Elements"
I may be wrong but I believe elements has a many more tools than lightroom for doing these jobs.

I have certainly edited more than 10 images in elements and have no desire to change to Lightroom yet, or are you referring to batch processing. We don't all shoot like that, ie having dozens of nearer identical images that can be processed as one.

All the best......Jim.

Jim - Anvh's explanation on the differences between Elements and Lightroom is very good. I started with Elements quite a few years ago but now use LIghtroom with just the odd dip into Elements nowadays! The only way to understand the difference though is to use both programs for a while!

Lightroom use ACR for his editing so everything you can do in ACR you can do in Lightroom. One of the bonus is that it's completely integrated and it's very easy to apply a setting to another photo.
Also Lightroom remembers all the changes you do so you can easily skip back to an earlier date or even make a "clone" image with certain settings which you can edit separately further as well.

We mostly do Fashion now and we both use lightroom and photoshop for our work.
In lightroom we manage all the photos, make selection and do the processing of the RAW. It's quite easy to get all images in 1 line their since they are basically next to each other. Then we open the image up in photoshop and clean the skin and such and sometimes add special effects with the layers.

So in lightroom we make a proper photo and with photoshop we make something special out of it.

In lightroom 5 they added a couple of features so it should now be easier to clone out unwanted objects and such.

So for your normal photography Lightroom these days is enough for most.
If you need layers or add text

yes you are editing pixels of course.

It's wrong to call Lightroom a RAW convertor in comparison to other image software like elements photoshop/ which also can process RAWs.

I edit loads of images in Lightroom that are nothing to do with RAWs, as they are either JPGs and TIFs.

Lightroom's forte is as much Catalogue and photomanagement as it is editing.

I fully agree with Stefan that Lightroom is more than enough for 99.9% of photo editing needs. And the great thing about it is it's a lot quicker than regular photo editing software, not least of which because of the ease of transferring edits from one photo to the next, or being able to store your own develop presets so you doesn't have to start from scratch everytime.

the only time I've never needed to edit something other than lightroom is when I've neede to add text or graphics to an image or clone out scratches from scanned slides/negatives or prints, and even with those images I'll do the rest in lightroom afterwards

Lightroom 5 now has a clone tool