Railfan Technology > Need Info Adobe Photo Shop

Need Info. I'm looking to put my train pictures on Rail pictures , Fickr and send to national train magazines. Which is better Adobe Photo shop or Adobe Light room, I shoot in RAW and I what to scan my slide collection going back to the 60's . I uses a Epson V600 flatbed  scanner. I have an Apple Mac.       

I find Lightroom meets 95% of my needs with Photoshop handling the rest.  Lightroom biggest strength is organizing batches of photos.  Photoshop is the standard for graphic artists throughout the world.  I get both along with mobile apps for a monthly fee.  Adobe believes their software is excellent and charges accordingly.  They have huge customer base willing to pay for the use of their software.

Bob Wilcox
Charlottesville, VA
My Flickr Shots

I get by well with Photoshop Elements now.  I didn't need all the bells and whistles that were in the full Photoshop.

In the past Photoshop Elements has been great, I've had two versions were I've sat down and felt productive right away, had some learning to do but that went quite well with a few Google searches and some traditional Photography website info.

Recently some Microsoft updates made some changes to the workflow, then I found that MS had decided to no longer support the 10 year old version of PSE that had been working so well. Bought PSE 2022 on Amazon for a decent price, loaded it up and can't find my old workflow or style of working with files, everything seems wrong. Now there's intermediate steps that have nothing to do with my intentions, haven't found any defaults or presets that work well, sometimes a file beigns to work out, sometimes it doesn't and no idea why.

The worst part is it keeps flagging for an update, which is normal for a fresh software package. The Adobe updater freezes my modem, not the router but the modem,. going to the Adobe helpless website finds this is pretty common and rather than finding a common flaw the Adobe Admin claims it's not an Adobe problem and because of the sheer numbers of people with the same problem it must be a problem with the users set up, then they locked the post about the modem freeze problem. In other similar situations the Software author finds a way to make it compatible with their Customers.

I doubt there is anything as useful as a well running Photoshop program, it does wonders to most photos. Can't recommend PSE 2022 because of the modem freeze problem. Don't know about previous versions, but the Computer OS may not support other versions.

Should add that both MicroSoft and Apple strongly push their Cloud Services to the point of rearranging your file system to prefer their Cloud, since I don't have a Cloud Account that saved me from having the PC load itself into the MS Cloud when I wasn't looking. One of the MS updates deleted my hardware and USB drives and inserted the Cloud instead, then Adobe put their Cloud right under that one. I had to reload the bios to get the drives to operate and display again.

For scanning traditional slides many people prefer VueScan software. Suggest doing a TO seach on VueScan for some ideas. I've been using an Epson flatbed with their software, I'm not unhappy with that combo but it's not anywhere near an archival quality set up. Hope that helps.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/22 17:28 by TCnR.

My Photoshop Elements is 2021 and I saw no reason to upgrade.  I've had zero problems with it, my computer or anything else involving it.  My Epson V700 scanning software suits me just fine.
You can buy older editions of Elements cheap, try one of those.

Frisco1522 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My Photoshop Elements is 2021 and I saw no reason
> to upgrade.  I've had zero problems with it, my
> computer or anything else involving it.  My Epson
> V700 scanning software suits me just fine.
> You can buy older editions of Elements cheap, try
> one of those.

That's a great advice.

The upgrade path to destruction is getting worse and worse as described by TCnR above. However, for those just getting started, it's difficult to "buy from the past" and avoid the pitfalls of "new tech" that's more about trapping consumers than providing useful features.

As others have noted above, I, too, use Lightroom for 90% or more of my editing.  The biggest feature, in my opinion, is 'mass edits'.  I edit the first picture of a group (of any size), highlight the ones I want to get the same edits, then hit the 'sync' (synchronize) button.  I start with basic color enhancements, some sharpening with noise some noise reduction, and lens corrections that I apply to an entire shoot.  Then I go back and fix white balance on the first of a small group shot under the same lighting conditions and sync that.  Lastly, I start individually editing each image.  First is always 'level' the image and maybe 'vertical' corrections.  Then I may do a couple extra color improvements.  Scanned slides get redeye correction if needed and smaller dust 'healing'.  Unlike Photoshop and Photoshop Elements (I have both), Lightroom doesn't allow source selection for the heal function nor the clone function, which makes tricky healing difficult and reserved for Elements.

When done with all the edits, I output the entire shoot (it runs all 8 processors/16 threads at 4.6ghz computer at 100%), I then start cooking them through Photoshop Elements.  I have bought a number of PE versions through the years and stopped at 15 due to the add-in noise correction product I use not supporting versions later than 15.  For slides, I zoom in and 'heal' any dust I didn't handle in Lightroom.  I specifically avoid using the 'dust and scratches' feature as it loses image clarity.  It's barely noticeable at 1 pixel, somewhat noticeable at 2 pixels, and totally unacceptable at 3 pixels.  I've scanned several thousand family slides for friends and had to fix massive scratches, even mold and major color shifts.  The color shifts are best handled in Lightroom in my opinion, but scratches, mold, etc, are best handled using the clone function in Elements.  I'm working on restoring a badly damaged glass plate negative for a friend and resorting to cloning 1 pixel at a time due to image damage.  I edit all the photos in Elements and then close the program ('X') and it asks to save each image one at a time.  Note...one can click and move each of those pop up boxes so that the 'OK' button on each of them overlap each other.  Then it becomes a matter of how fast can I left click the OK button without moving the mouse.  The bigger the batch, the more time saved at output time with no mouse movement.

Why Photoshop Elements over Photoshop?  It contains almost everything I could ever want to do to an image, and even putting smiles on faces, and has a far less cluttered screen with larger icons than Photoshop.  These days, I generally reserve Photoshop for layer edits and 'heavy duty' cloning when source-selection with the 'smart wand' doesn't work as well as I'd like in Elements.  Needless to say, I do as little 'exotic' editing as possible.  I have no hope whatsoever of ever understanding at least 75% of Photoshop capabilities.  Elements is far easier to use and even has multiple skill-level options.

Edit: If I'm going to be printing images, I copy the entire 'finished' folder to a new folder titled: 4x6.  And if desired, a 5x7 and 8x10 folder.  I then delete in the 4z6 folder images I'm not going to print at 4x6.  Then, I use Elements to individually crop each image to 4x6 rather than letting my printer software 'decide' how to crop to 4x6 (or 5x7, or 8x10).  I use Elements for that cropping as I can set the size once and not have to choose it for every image as is required in Lightroom.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/22 13:07 by BRAtkinson.

Very helpful post. I will try some of these ideas. I have been scanning plenty of shots, but done very little editing. Time to start getting things in a more useable state.

Posted from Android

I have used Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Lightroom.  If you are starting with a reasonably well exposed original, either Elements or Lightroom is all you need.  If you have a transparancy that has faded or color shifted, or if you are starting with a color negative, then the color adjustment tools in the full Photoshop are far superior.

JBWX

As I mentioned, I'm satisfied with Photoshop Elements 2021 and it does anything I feel like doing.  MInd you, my main objective is scanning my B&W negative collections from over the years some dating back to the '20s in all sizes and varieties.
When I wrote my Frisco book, I did all the editing sitting in my recliner as my wife's care giver and keeping an eye on her needs.   Some of the old images took hours to clean up and make them pop.  I even colorized a few, being very subtle about it and liked the results.  I also have some add on software from Topaz labs that helped eliminate spending hours cleaning up the sky.
I have no desire to use a Cloud service.  Guess I'm paranoid.
I'm old and set in my ways.  I wish MS would take their upgrades and stick them sometimes.