Photoshop vs Elements vs Lightroom

While the Lightroom feature-set is broadest, its image processing features are the simplest. Photoshop CS5 Extended edition has by far the most features but Elements has several unique features. Individual feature-sets reflect market segmentation:

• Lightroom is aimed at professional photographers but not necessarily those who manipulate images extensively. As such, it provides sophisticated photo correction and development tools but not much for digital art.
• Photoshop and Photoshop Extended are both aimed at digital artists of all kinds, whether or not their art starts from photographs. Any number of images can be combined to produce artwork in Photoshop.
• Elements is intended for home users and amateur photographers. Its numerous manipulation tools can be used for mixed-media artwork and composite images. It also has additional print-shop style features for greeting cards, invitations, calendars and the like.

Lightroom is extremely popular with photographers as it covers all essential image processing functions and several more: Crop & Rotate, Spot-Removal, Redeye, Color-Balance, Curves, Color-Adjustments, Split-Toning, Sharpening, Noise-Reduction, Lens CorrectionDistortion, Vignetting, Aberrations, either by profile or manually, Vignetting, Grain, Color-Calibration and B&W Conversion. Its Curves are adjustable directly as well as through a number of controls like Exposure, Highlight Recovery, Fill Light, Black Level, Brightness and Contrast. Color rendition is controlled using Clarity, Vibrance, Saturation and the Camera Calibration tool.

Photoshop Elements has plenty more processing tools, including automatic modes for contrast, levels, color, sharpness and redeye. It actually covers most Lightroom functions, although several are expressed differently. Of note is that there is no direct-manual adjustment of curves and no profile-based lens correction. Although not an actually lens correction, Perspective Control is included in Elements' Correct Camera Distortion module.

Elements has sophisticated selection tools which can apply over 100 effects selectively to different areas and layers. These effects range from ultra-simple ones like Invert to very artistic ones like Pointilize. It also offers some drawing capabilities with about 50 customizable brushes. This makes Elements suitable for creating artwork from images.

Both Photoshop CS5 Standard and Extended editions include a huge array of image processing tools with more fine-grained and manual controls than offered by Elements. These extra features are sometimes needed by some professionals. Particularly, both CS5 versions support the LAB and CMYK color-spaces used for offset-printing. Also inline with high-end use, Photoshop has more tools available for images with 16-bit and 32-bit per-channel.

Photoshop also supports the creation of actions which can be used for batch processing. Elements on the other hand can perform basic batch processing without the creation of actions. CS5 also includes advanced color-management and Color Match functionality.

As mentioned earlier in this comparison, Elements has unique features as well. Many of them offering an automated or assisted way of performing operations which would be rather complex in Photoshop. The Smart Brush is a great example, it makes applying a selection or effect much easier at the expense of direct control. Another is the Photomerge tools that use multiple images to create automatic composites. Finally, the cookie cutter tool easily chops sections of images.

Elements adds support for multi-page documents. These documents store multiple images as pages within a single file. It can also divide a sheet of scanned photos into individual image files. The photo organizer, which is easy to ignore by those who have another method, offers a number of image sharing features as well.