Recommendations for image editing software

Which image editing software would you recommend for a newbie? I'm familiar with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and GIMP but have not used any of them in anger. I wonder what other people's experiences have been? Ideally I want to be able to start to play around with processing RAW files but without a huge learning curve. Any suggestions?

Lightroom will probably cater for 99.999% of what you'll need to do. Photoshop Elements will do the rest.

Between them, they are an excellent combination.

Full blown Photoshop may be a bit OTT for a newbie.

If you are a registered student you can get them all reasonably cheaply.

Keep an eye on Amazon.co.uk this week for bargains on Lightroom and PSE10 in their Black Friday sale. Alternatively Adobe have an offer on Lightroom too, for a little bit more than the Amazon price.
I have just ordered Lightroom from them to add to PSE9.

I am hoping what Peter says is true - no reason to doubt him of course .

40% off of Lightroom and PSE from Adobe today, here.

It seems to be a good time to buy photo editing software at the moment as there appear to be offers all over the place. Photo Plus x4 is another one that seems to come highly recommended by some people and is available by the mfr (serif) for less than £14 inc p+p.

On a more focussed note, do all these packages cater well for Pentax DSLR users, or are some better than others? Should Pentax DSLR users be avoiding a particular package
because of the paucity of support?

At £14, PhotoPlus X4 is a no-brainer (as we like to say nowadays). I've used the various incarnations of PhotoPlus for years and I've yet to find a function it doesn't have.The reason it's so cheap is that its successor, X5, has now been released. The new product seems has a couple of added "features" but, for most photographers, there aren't enough practical benefits to make the upgrade a must-have. I'd be surprised if you found anything you needed missing from X4.

Al

I guess it depends on whether you shoot RAW or not, and if you do whether the software you use supports either the PEFs from your camera, or DNG.
At least with Adobe you can be sure they support DNGs and most PEFs provide the software is a fairly new version.

I have used PhotoPlus X4 and now have X5 for astronomical image processing. For the money, it does a lot of what Photoshop will do, and it does it well. However, for general use, I would echo what others have stated... Lightroom will do pretty well all that you need to do.

Elements 9 does all I need at the moment.

I don't know if any of them carry lens profiles for Pentax lenses .. some of them yes, but not the full range. Others using LR3 end PSE could tell you more. So that's maybe worth looking out for but it's certainly not a deal killer

I use lightroom 3 and love it - I like to keep tweaking to a minimum anyway

Like the name of your photo blog - do I detect a Depeche Mode fan?

Lightroom 3 is currently £120 at PCWorld

I guess it will go up again once Amazon's Black Friday offers end

I'm lucky to have kids at school, I think the education price for lightroom is about £70 or so.

Lightroom back up on Amazon today at 13.20.