Intro:
You may or may not know that I edit my photos in Photoshop 2020 for the most part. If you know Adobe well, you will know that they make four different premium photography editing software’s. These include Photoshop Elements (what I use), Photoshop CC, Lightroom Classic, and Lightroom CC. Lightroom is probably the most well known software that most photographers use but photoshop is used for a lot of other artists from youtubers to graphic design artists. I use Photoshop Elements because of the wider versatility. Yes photoshop doesn’t have all of Lightroom’s features but Lightroom also doesn’t have as many Photoshop features. Personally, the way I edit my photos involves features that are exclusively on photoshop as you will see below.
Photoshop VS Lightroom:
The main reason that I don’t use Lightroom is because I was given Photoshop as a gift. But despite that fact, given the choice, I would probably not have chosen to use Lightroom anyways when choosing one or the other. I like how Photoshop has almost all the features of Lightroom but it also has the features that you get with any photoshop software’s. Also, there is no such thing as “Lightroom Elements” like there is “Photoshop Elements”. What is the difference then? Photoshop Elements has tutorials and shortcuts to navigate the vast settings in the program to get where you want to go faster. Photoshop Elements is probably the best premium photo editor for a beginner if you want to know how to navigate the program and have great built in tutorials. For me this is my first premium photo editor and I often use these tutorials or short cuts to skip the searching through the settings. So, now I am going to do a walkthrough on how I go about editing an unedited photo for the blog.
Editing a Photo:
The first photo just shows the image as I imported it into Photoshop before work was done to the photo. The second screenshot shows me using one of the preset shortcuts to remove the background. After that you can see that the photo needs to be touched up and after fifteen minutes we got the fifth screenshot. Finally, after another half hour of editing I got the final photo. In that half hour I touched up the flowers imperfections and touched up some other parts of the flower to get the final result which is below.
This photo is a great demonstration of why I use photoshop. Photoshop is great at removing and replacing parts of images like what I did in this photo and this is just something that photoshop is great at.
Other Edits
Below are some other photos that I have edited for the blog in past posts. I thought that you might find it interesting what photos looked like before they were edited and uploaded to the blog.
Drag the slider to see before and after edits.
I really hope that you enjoyed this weeks post! Please comment on what your favorite editing software is and let me know! Thank you for reading!
-Digital Wonders & Smiles
Digital Wonders and Smiles 
Thanks for sharing your editing process. Personally, I like the background in the first image, I find it leads the eye into the flower and is blurred enough to not be too distracting 🙂 I was “brought up” with photoshop from version 2 when I worked for a newspaper – 26 years of what now seems like a past life. I was lucky enough to buy a copy of the last version of “Creative Suite” before the constant money grabbing subscription model came in. It still works fine and more than meets my needs. I still regularly discover new things it does that I was unaware of, like image stacking after recently buying a macro lens.
GIMP is a good free open source option for editing photos too.
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Thanks so much! I definitely wasn’t sure if I wanted to edit that photo or not. It’s super cool that you have had photoshop throughout your life! I completely agree about the subscription thing taking a lot of money constantly. The Photoshop Elements luckily was a one time pay and I also got Premiere Elements as well and got a dvd version to download which was definitely nice considering that these days it is mainly subscription based on their CC version. I had also used GIMP at a class once but never knew that there was a free version! I will definitely download that and maybe do a post as well. Thank you!
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If it does what you need Elements is a great option. If you edit video I highly recommended the free version of Davinci Resolve if your PC is up to it. The earlier versions work on my old first gen i7 but the newer ones like to crash. I find it way more intuitive than Premier, theres some great tutorials on youtube 🙂
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Thank you so much! I don’t do a ton of video but do work with it a bit. I will definitely check that out! Premier difficult to navigate at times. 🙂
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PSE has been my go-to photo editor for at least a decade; my current version is 2018 and Adobe is making it harder to find the upgrade on their website. They do offer the full 2020 as a trial download. Do you feel it is worth upgrading?
Also, did you watch Adobe’s virtual gathering, MAX, last month? There were several interesting features in PS that are not available in PSE, significantly Smart Objects.
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Yes, Adobe definetly did make it difficult to get the elements updates. I got physical disk copies but they were apparently difficult to get because they are always advertising the subscription and not the one time purchase. I definitely don’t know to much about the 2018 version but I think that there are changes every year. I think it is just based on what features you would like to use. I didn’t hear about the Adobe event but I will definitely look into the smart objects because I haven’t heard of them before. Thank you so much! 😊📸
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Happy to share! The event was interesting and inspiring, geared to creatives, but of course also promoting Adobe’s flagship products, which PSE is not one of them. Smart Objects sort of turns your raster image into a vector so the original image information is all there in case you want to resize the image. That function is not available in PSE, but I just duplicate the original before working on it. 🙂 And as TasView hinted at, system requirements are going up. Soon my 2-year-old computer won’t be able to handle even PSE!
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To make matters worse, 2020 has given way to 2021 and the hardware requirements have changed to the point where even my 2-year-old computer cannot handle it. It’s all because of the Sensei features. Bah, humbug!
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Let’s hope that they don’t make the subscription the only way to get photoshop. I got a new laptop for editing this year and am hopeful it will still run photoshop in a few years!
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PE 2020 is a good choice.
I use this along with LR.
Thank you so much for the tips and steps to get those beautiful clicks.
Happy Holidays my friend
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Thank you! I am so glad that the tips were helpful! Happy Holidays! ❄️
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You are welcome my friend
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