A lot of great advice. Let me put it to you simply. If you're only considering Elements because it will serve as a gateway into learning Photoshop, then just bite the bullet, spend the money and go CS6. Huge learning curve? Absolutely. But, if you've used Lightroom, the interface is similar enough that now all you need to learn are the tools. Seriously. There are tons of great free tutorials out there, some from Adobe, some elsewhere. You can either pick and choose through them, or bite the bullet and pay for some. The fact is, the difference between a great photo you've taken and that great photo you keep staring at on 500px.com and wondering, ""Why can't I get mine to look like that?", is that the person on 500px knows knows how to use Photoshop to take advantage of every photo.
You can get some of the way there with Elements and other plugins, but not all the way. I tried and thought I was succeeding. But as I sat for 6 hours and listened to Scott Kelby talk about Photography and watched some of the little things he turned to Photoshop for, I could see that it was those little things that made a difference. So I bit the bullet and joined NAPP (photoshopuser.com) and after about 10 hours of video and one monthly magazine I'm already impressing the heck out of myself with what I can do to photos I took 2 years ago that I knew were good, but I just couldn't make them pop the way I wanted them to -
needed them to. And there's still a million things I don't know yet. And then there's the things I never would have thought about. Like taking the photo below that I posted
in this post and where I added some realistic DoF bokeh ... in under a minute. I would have struggled with that for far too long and come up short without seeing someone else do it first.
I'm not trying to sell you on any one set of instruction, only saying that the jump to Photoshop is like college. Sure, you can learn the stuff they teach there on your own, but there are systems of learning it that work and instead of hunting and pecking through YouTube get access to a comprehensive set of videos and go through them. NAPP is $99 for a year, and it gets you a year of Photoshop User magazine plus access to their training site while contains complete walkthroughs of both CS6 and LR4, and this set of additional detailed courses. Use that to compare to other sites.
And the difference in interfaces between PS and Elements is starting to become greater. Elements 9 was fairly close to CS5, but Elements 11, while a better tool than 9, is very different from CS6 in terms of where you go to set certain tool parameters. It's the best Elements I've used in terms of what you can do with an image (it has content aware healing brush, but not fill), but it's not Photoshop.
