Welcome Chuck. I originally started out with Photoshop... It makes me want to kill myself. It has the most counter-intuitive, primitive interface imaginable. Doing the simplest thing used to take me ten minutes of hunting menus only to find out I needed to press the ALT key to see the option. However complicated you can do anything you can think of, if you live long enough. Now Lightroom 4 is a whole different story. It is made as a darkroom product, they renamed the adjusters to things that make sense... Like sliders for "high-lights" and "low-lights". It'll auto load your photos when you plug in your CF card, apply pre-sets, and you can fly through your photos making them hugely better in a couple seconds each. There is a learning curve, but in a day or two you can be looking at much better photos and enjoying the experience. I used to waste away whole nights in the darkroom, this world is orders of magnitude easier and more effective... Unless as a novice you buy Photoshop... Then your screwed for the first few years until you can learn to navigate. JD