I think I'm going to go for the Adobe subscription thing....

dubdisciple
au contrair on the paying for Lynda.com:
 
http://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/2012/12/06/new-york-public-library-partners-lyndacom-provide-patrons-free-access
 
most public libraries around the country offer this

sharke

dubdisciple
au contrair on the paying for Lynda.com:
 
http://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/2012/12/06/new-york-public-library-partners-lyndacom-provide-patrons-free-access
 
most public libraries around the country offer this

Yeah but are they open at 1am when I'm usually knee deep in this sort of thing? 

davdud101
Ohhh, Adobe software is just mint. I think $50/month is steep but if you can do it in ANY volume, DO IT. I think I saw Flash at $15/month, which I might do after a trial (30-days to learn it, haha)

SteveStrummerUK

dubdisciple
I keep telling myself  i will start using Lightroom, but years of photoshop use have me rooted in a workflow.

Dub, I came from it the other way round. I intensively learned Lightroom 4 long before I had even considered upgrading from PS Elements to Photoshop.
 
From my perspective, I've put together a nice suite of software and plug-ins that give me some great tools, and plenty of options, to process my photos from the RAW file coming off my camera's SD card right through to a web or print-friendly final image. If anything, so good is the software we now have at our fingertips, the difficult choices can be to decide which processes one actually applies to any given image.
 
How I start the process of creating an image largely depends on whether I'd been shooting HDR or not, and what quality the final image needs to be. I pretty much always shoot so each photo is saved in both RAW and JPEG format, so I'm covering all the bases as to what I'm going to end up using the images for.
 
If, for example, I'm shooting a set of images to use in an eBay listing, I'll bring the jpegs straight into Photoshop, then perform basic exposure corrections and crops before batch processing the set to resize down and sharpen them all.
 
For my own stuff, I'll either open the RAW files in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw inside Photoshop. With HDR, I have favoured Photomatix Pro to merge the original RAW files before exporting the final TIFF into Photoshop. I have dabbled in Nik Collection HDR Efex Pro and Photoshop's Merge To HDR Pro, although of the three, I always seem to come back to Photomatix. I have been experimenting lately with using Photomatix to create a 32bit HDR file and then opening this file in Adobe Camera RAW to actually create the final image. This can a great way to achieve more 'natural' looking results, but it is very time-consuming.
 
With Lightroom 6/CC however, I think Adobe has come up with a bit of a game changer for the HDR enthusiast. LR now allows you to import the RAW files as usual, but now the HDR processing can be done 'in house' so to speak without having to export each set to another program. Where LR really scores is that the HDR image it creates is not 'pixel-based' as they call it, but is actually still a RAW file, or to use Adobe's designation, a Digital Negative (DNG). The nearest equivalent to this method is the Photomatix 32bit into Photoshop workflow I mentioned above (but much, much quicker), but whereas that process creates a .hdr file that can only be opened in HDR software, the Lightroom DNG can be further processed in Lightroom (as you would any other imported RAW file) or exported and opened in any RAW processing software.
 
I'm now really trying to get proficient in what is for me a completely new HDR workflow, creating the HDR RAW in Lightroom before bringing it into Photoshop to edit with all the various layer and layer-masking techniques I'm learning.
 
It's funny, but the more I dig into digital photography and image manipulation, the more similarities and corollaries I see with digital audio processing. If anything, having never processed my own film, all I ever learned about photography many years ago stops being of much help once I've taken the shot. I see a RAW image file in much the same way as a guitar track that's just been recorded. With both disciplines, you start with a 'raw' beginning (literally in the case of photography) before using software and plugins to end up with a finished product, be that a printed photograph or a mixed and mastered piece of music.