For years I have been using the free Raw Shooter Essentials software but I feel it is now limited as you cannot crop and I feel the colors, contrast do not look the same whenever rendered to a Jpeg, whatever format Jpeg you choose .

So far I have been looking at Photoshop elements 11 as this now handles RAW. This is the price I am willing to pay, not 100's for Photoshop. Would this be the best choice for me ?

I would go for Lightroom - not only is it a lot cheaper than Photoshop, but it also gives you some great tools for organizing your images, keywording them and exporting to JPEGs for upload. I find that probably 80% of my images can be completed totally in Lightroom and I only go to a full image editing system to remove complex logos and things like that.

Steve

If you're a Nikon user Capture NX2 is great, it's designed to work with Nikon cameras, is very intuitive, I have pretty much 100% acceptance rate with it.

Yes, I am just downloading NX for free :-)

i remember i tried bibble before..it seems quite good.. but it seldom discuss..anyone using it?

I second what Steve said.

Plus - it's been quite a few years but if my foggy memory serves - Adobe bought out Rawshooter then used it as the basis for parts of Lightroom 1.

Thanks folks. Yep, looks like I will go for Lightroom 4. It will mean going through all my old Raw files and doing them properly. Might mean pulling some shots and re-submitting looking on what you can do with this amazing software.