My eldest could do with something to edit photos for GCSE work. I had a work copy of Elements a couple of years ago and found it ok. I’ve been happy enough with Picasa for my stuff – I’m old and still feel a little bit dirty doing too much processing. Mac for what it’s worth.

Anyone care to enlighten me?

Elements will be fine.

Elements for editing photos one by one, lightroom for bulk processing and handling lots of pics.

Well, no one shouldn’t feel dirty processing an image….. Just because it’s now done digitally! What do you think a darkroom was used for? I use Capture One for work, also Lightroom. If your eldest just wants to tweak images without any serious Photoshop work, Lightroom is good enough and it won’t cost the earth.

My advice would be to sign up for adobe creative cloud photography package £9/month and get Lightroom and the full version of photoshop.
Alternatively as a student for £16 / month you can get the whole creative cloud suite.
That said, I’ve not actually given Aperture a go.
Lightroom is a fantastic photo management and RAW processing software, but if he needs to do any pixel level work, cloning, masking, layers, type, etc, etc then he’ll have to have either photoshop or at least elements.

Having recently been downgraded from cs to elements I’m amazed to find so much still there. For what we do (newspapers) elements is no problem.

Aperture is more about organising and storing photos. Think of it as a slightly better iPhoto.
It will do the basic editing things, but its not lightroom or photoshop.

TheGimp

Its free.

Aperture’s editing capability is a lot more than just slightly better than iPhoto. It can do almost everything that Elements can do but granted it is more limited in the range if adjustment it offers in a given tool set and it does lack a few key features. But it’s pretty much all there if you know where to look.

I’m also a fan of Capture One primarily for the range of adjustment within a tool.

As a more haphazard photographer I couldn’t get on with lightroom. The batch processing and organising tools were lost on me but missed the ‘proper’ editing tools. Ditched it and back to manual organising and individual editing in ps as an when required.

A sales guy was trying to sell me the latest Serif PhotoPlus for £35 the other day, which processes raw for a lot of cameras.

If you ring them you might be able to get a good price, that was his advice anyway.

I have their WebPlus and it seems pretty decent, although the interface could be a little more intuitive.

Photoshop cc is £8 per month and always upto date

Photoshop cc is £8 per month and always upto date

Really overkill for a school project 🙁

Can’t you just download a trial version of Photoshop? If it’s just for a short time (less thn 30 days) then it’ll be perfect.

Mac – look at Pixelmator for photo editing.

As others have said Aperture is more about organising photos and workflow management (albeit with some editing functions). If you’re wanting to get artistic then PS Elements or Pixelmator might fit better.

Depends what you mean by editing, but if iPhoto isn’t enough, he could try Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/The_Seashore_Project/About.html) (based on GIMP) which is more of a Photoshop alternative.

BUT, Lightroom and Aperture are different beasts than Photoshop.

Darktable (http://www.darktable.org) may be a suitable alternative to Lightroom & Aperture.

I bought an new copy of an old version of Photoshop (For £10 from softwareforstudents). It’s a bit clunky but works really well I think. I also have a copy of lightroom, which I’m finding hard to get on with (Need to devote a bit of time to getting into it)

Thanks for all the replies, terrific stuff. I understand a bit more, even if I’m not much clearer! I’m too tight to subscribe to full Photoshop by the way. We’re heading more towards individual editing rather than batch processing. And he’s a she for the record – she’s doing work experience with a photographer next month so we’ll get his take on things too 🙂

What to get would in my opinion depend on what format she’s shooting in, if she’s shooting in RAW then definitely go with Aperture (Mac only I think) or Lightroom, if she’s shooting jpeg Elements would be fine.

If she’s doing it properly, then she’ll be shooting in RAW.

Lightroom is my bread and butter tool but I’ve been using it since before it was an Adobe product.

It’s no good for layers and advanced editing but then again I doubt many people do more than scratch the surface of what Photoshop is capable of.

Not used Elements but it sounds like it’ll do pretty much everything that your ‘average joe/josephine’ would want.

I’d also question the logical of chucking money at what may only be a short term requirement.

We’re both JPG at the moment, hangover from being tight on disk space I guess. I can’t see me getting too deep into any package, but my daughter may be considerably cleverer than me. I think whatever we pick will get used for a while if it suits.

I gather you can get very good student discounts for Adobe products and there are ‘other methods’ to get software keys. 😉

I reckon Elements would do the trick though.

We’re both JPG at the moment, hangover from being tight on disk space I guess. I can’t see me getting too deep into any package, but my daughter may be considerably cleverer than me. I think whatever we pick will get used for a while if it suits.

If you’re mac baser aperture will do everything you need, for £55.00 it’s a bargain.

Take the step to RAW as well, it allows you to do so much more in the digital darkroom than jpg. You wont regret it..