lightroom, elements organiser please help?

[isedarken]

Hi, Firstly I hope this is in the correct forum.

I currently have a Nikon D50 with a kit lense and a 70-300 tamron lense. a panasonic video camera and photoshop elements 8 and premier 8. i use the organiser that comes with this. Mainly i photo the children, holidays etc and sometimes get out to do some landscape and animal photography. I am wondering whether upgrading to lightroom would be a worthwhile option. Would i notice the improvement over the organiser i currently use? I use the photo tagging ability alot, but i find the organiser very glitchy and slow. My pc is a i5 with 8gb ram and ample harddrive space, also a fast graphics card. I appreciate any opinions on this,

Thankyou

[donoreo]

Lightroom is far more advanced for keeping your photos organised. It will import your elements catalogue with no problem.

You did not say what version of windows. The latest Lightroom will not run on XP.

[isedarken]

Originally Posted by donoreo

Lightroom is far more advanced for keeping your photos organised. It will import your elements catalogue with no problem.

You did not say what version of windows. The latest Lightroom will not run on XP.

I run windows 7, thankyou.

I have a further question, will it catalogue my video files also? and will it still let me use elements 8 for the photo altering that i do sometimes. I understand lightroom has some tools but is not as comprehensive as elements?

Cheers David

[donoreo]

LR does video as well.

You can edit externally in Elements and then bring it back into LR. However, it depends on how you shoot which way you want to do it. If you shoot in RAW format, then LR has more flexibility. The RAW tools in LR are the same as in the CS version of Photoshop (the expensive one). I switched to LR, mainly for the RAW controls, and hardly ever go to Elements anymore (I have 9).

[isedarken]

Ok, that helps alot, thankyou.

Upto now i've mainly used jpeg, however RAW is something I wish to try and use more as from what ive read it keeps more detail and allows you to be more flexible with what you can play around with on the pc., so perhaps lightroom is the way togo.

Thankyou for your answers, its appreciated. Guess I'd better go out looking for a good deal on a copy.

David