Lightroom 4 or 5?

[Furnari]

After struggling with the clunkiness of the Olympus software that came with my E-PL2, I'm wanting to upgrade to Lightroom. I can pick up 4 for about half the price of 5- is it worth it to spend the extra money upfront? In theory, if 6 comes out next summer, I can spend the difference then and upgrade.

[chokolad]

4 is fine. I would have stayed with 3 if I could, 4 became much slower.

[dphershman]

Go with 5, unless you're certain you're going to keep using an older camera that is supported by LR4. Lightroom 4 doesn't support the latest cameras (I know this from experience). If you buy a newer camera you're out of luck with 4 because Adobe doesn't release RAW file upgrades for older versions of Lightroom. Adobe will however release updates to its current versions of LR until it comes out with a new version (LR6).

[dlh]

Just go to LR5. Lightroom is pretty useful and one of the better photo management tools out there, but it is notoriously buggy and slow. The latest updates for LR5 are much better than where LR4 left off. If you show RAW, which I highly recommend for UW photography, it's very powerful. You will need to spend some time learning to work with it, but there are some very useful tutorials, articles, and videos that will help you out.

[maelstrom]

I went straight from LR3 to LR5. It is a huge improvement. For UW photography, the spot removal tool improvement alone is worth it for getting rid of backscatter. I rarely ever use Photoshop now.

[spatman]

Just go to LR5. Lightroom is pretty useful and one of the better photo management tools out there, but it is notoriously buggy and slow.

I've been using LR3 for quite some time (mac) and have not experienced any performance problems whatsoever.

That said, what are the benefits to upgrading to LR5?

[spatman]

Just go to LR5. Lightroom is pretty useful and one of the better photo management tools out there, but it is notoriously buggy and slow.

I've been using LR3 for quite some time (mac) and have not experienced any performance problems whatsoever.

That said, what are the benefits to upgrading to LR5?

[enchantmentdivi]

Make sure your computer has enough RAM to run LR without it totally bogging down. 8g is not enough. 16g is sufficient, but more would be even better. LR is a total memory hog!

[dphershman]

Make sure your computer has enough RAM to run LR without it totally bogging down. 8g is not enough. 16g is sufficient, but more would be even better. LR is a total memory hog!

The minimum dram requirements for LR is 4 gigs, I can state that it ran quite well with 4 gigs on my laptop. Sometimes I run Photoshop along with LR when Im doing HDR images and panoramas, so I found that upgrading to 16 gigs helped that along quite a bit. The extra memory didn't really make a difference in the basic operations of Lightroom alone however.

Adobe says however that the computer's CPU makes a big difference, i5 and i7 quad core processors (typically found on machines less than two years old) run circles around the older duo core models.

Here's what Adobe has to say...

http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/opt ... troom.html

Dan