Elements is frequently described as 70% of Photoshop for $70. Whereas Photoshop used to cost around $700.
But these days, I almost jokingly tell students that I avoid Photoshop (and by extension Photoshop elements) as much as possible! I describe the full version of Photoshop as the 10 pounds sledgehammer in your garage. You're really glad it's there, but don't need to use it every day. I highly recommend the Adobe creative cloud for photographers subscription service for $10 a month. Now a lot of people balk at the idea of the subscription service, but I still think it's quite a good deal. You get Lightroom, the full version of Photoshop, the ability to do local edits (meaning adjust only part of an image) on your smartphone, plus it creates as a website of your collections, and it automatically downloads images from your smartphone to your computer. So for $0.33 today, I think it's a great deal for something that connects my passion of photography with my creativity, and keeps my images organized. Lightroom has become so robust, that I tell people I can do 95% of what I need to do, or more, in the program and never open up Photoshop
The challenge with Lightroom is that while it's a great program, but Adobe has been a terrible job of showing people the best way to use it. Most of the classes I teach at the local college and university as well as my work with students one-on-one is focused on developing a workflow to efficiently download, organize, optimize and then output their images to the world through social media, printing, books, slideshows or creating a web gallery, all of which I do in Lightroom!
If you're interested in learning more about Lightroom and working together, please get in contact with me. The images I've been able to take on my smart phone in the Lightroom and optimize them on my phone have been quite breathtaking. I'm sorry this venue doesn't give me the option to upload images.
Thanks,
Reid
