Digital BW, The Print

Another option is to use the Organizer in Photoshop Elements (PSE). It has a fairly robust multiple cataloging function with backup, keywording, searching, metadata, collections, etc., and has many PS similarities. While in the Organizer just highlight an image and hit Ctrl/H and the image is sent to PS or to ACR is it's a RAW file. Of course it has it's own Editor with about 80% of the capabilities of PS and has built-in bookmaking and other projects, like calendars, etc. It's a lot cheaper than LR so you might want to check out the demo. PSE with CS5 works pretty well for me.
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As new to this list and for the most part being a spider under the table listening and hopefully learning from the many experienced smart people here, I have been a B&W hobbiest since I was 8 and grew up with a darkroom and then used bathrooms and hallways for many years finally getting a small 8 x 10 darkroom in my workshop about 30 years ago and using it until 2006. I got my first digital a Sony Mavica in 1995 and continued shooting film until I exausted the supply of Fugi color print and slide film in the freezer. I went through a number of digital cameras chasing pixels and used Photoshop 5 and later Elements 6 and 8 mostly for retouching scanned old family photos. I have been 100% digital for 4 years now, retired I am setting up a digital darkroom and am paying attention to the discussions here and learning a lot and doing a lot of web searching for those questions that come up as I read. I picked up several books I have seen mentioned and a number of others with interesting titles that people on Amazon recomended in their lists or were on the also bought list on Amazon.

I have noticed a few who use Elements with Photoshop and some prefer Lightroom I suppose there are some who use only Photoshop I even read a post on another list of someone using Lightroom with PSE for editing. I have been using Elements only the last couple of years and one of the books I purchased was on ver 8. I just set up the Organizer with the photos from our 4 month backpacking trip to southern England. In Learning PSE 8 Organizer I started and deleted what I had done a number of times and finally have a reasonable I think structure Although if I did it again I would do it differently. I did not want to spend a lot of time placing images into the organizer as I felt my path would lead to Lightroom 4 and then to PS CS6. Here in Texas seniors can attend classes at state schools for $20 so I signed up and when PS CS6 becomes available I will purchase it at the campus bookstore currently Adobe is running CS 5 Premium at a $100 discount from student list price so I assume 6 is not far off. For the present I have found that if I needed to do something not in Elements there was usually a plug in available to do what I wanted many of these are free so I have loaded around a dozen of these into the proper folder and I have also found some stand alone programs like InPaint that for a tiny price would allow me to do advanced photoshop tasks in a few simple steps. As a member of an online group that does one day beta testing I have found a few useful photography manipulation programs that by evaluating I get a free copy to use InPaint was one of these.

So I have at this point in time found Elements with additional add on routines to do what I need at this point in my journey. I am taking a class on Elements this spring, they have ver 9 on the lab computers so my knowledge of 8 should come across fine, on the recomendation of the Photoshop instructor since Photoshop is a 2 semester course and it begins in the fall this will serve as a prerequisite along with my experence with darkroom work. I am also taking Digital Cameras and Digital Scanning as part of the prerequisite so he can be sure I am up for the class and suggested I get a copy of Photoshop before class and spend some time going over the basics. If I could not purchase PS 6 at the student rate I would probably use PSE with plugins or perhaps Lightroom.

Bill Lewis