Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'll start off by saying I thought $300 for a photo program was more than I wanted to spend. I had tried the 30 day trial when LR2 came out, but couldn't get in enough keyboard time during the 30 day trial period. I decided to try the Beta when LR3 B1 came out and actually got about 70 days under my belt before B2 expired. I had bought and used Elements 3 and 7, and while pretty good enhancers, there organizational abilities were weak. By weak, I mean, once they were catalogued and or key worded, they were fine, but the key wording was tedious. Enter LR3. It doesn't have the capability of Elements (or photoshop either, I assume) but it does have enough capability to handle 90+% of what I do. What I usually do is correct color and exposure, saturate or desatureate some colors to enhance the image or de-emphasize the back ground, sharpen things up a bit and or decrease noise, mostly luminous, and apply the lens correction feature. I have also used the curves feature and the section I think they call shade, saturation and Lumination to make local adjustment to brightness and color. All in all, I can make almost all reasonably exposed photos, (+-2.5 stops) look pretty good. The program doesnot have the capability to distort shape, color or texture for artistic purposes, which I do not do at this time. The program does have a perspective correction section which I have had reasonable success with on the small number of uses I have had with it. I have dabbled in the other features, such as healingand red eye reduction (easy and effecetive), paint brushing, tinting etc. My experience here is limited, but the features seem to be effective. Its real standout is organization. I had about 11,000 photos in my file which I reduced to about 8000 by using the easy to use "compare mode". I also keyworded these images in about 2 weeks of daily effort averaging 2 to 4 hours per day. ( a concentrated effort for sure). The keywords are easy to set up and the program's auto-type and table of recent keywords is very helpful and a great time saver. In general, I say if your main goal is organization of your file, perhaps coupled with a desire for slide show, this program has a lot of features to consider, (I did not use the print or post to facebook sections at all). If you're into MAJOR image correction or enhancement, for artistic purposes, this program will fall short. I hope this helps.