RE Scanning negatives to digital--I am expecting to edit the digital image (n LR most likely ) and want to produce larger color prints e.g. 16x20 or 20 x24.
Most likely you will need to use something in addition to Lightroom. Scanning will result with dust that needs to be cloned/healed out. This will be extensive and Lightroom's clone tool wasn't designed for mass use. Even with auto software removal of dust, further removal is usually needed in part because the auto function may think something is dust when it is part of the image and it could be rather heavy handed ruining the detail of the image.
I use Lightroom for all my 4000dpi film scans, including spotting any remaining dust. Lightroom's spooting tool is perfect for that. It's unique realtime preview adjustment of that tool is awesome.
Real time is nice, but if you have a lot of spots to do I would not recommend it.
Why?
LR is a memory hog of a program
Actually, it isn't. It would be a much faster and better app if it actually was. That's coming from someone with 32GB of RAM. I wish it did use a lot of RAM.
and is slow for a function like that.
LR 5 on my system bogs down at around 100 dust corrections and then I simply save the changes to another tif and continue. Even with that extra step it is by far the best tool I have ever used for spotting/dust correcting my high resolution negative scans. Overall my speed is much greater with LR 5 than using any other app for dust correction.
A simple program like photoshop elements is faster.
No, it isn't. There is no realtime adjustment preview of your correction so it is even less effective in addition to being slower. It is also an 8 bit tool.
LR forces you to choose each time where to sample from. If you don't it guesses for you.
If it is guessing for you then how is it forcing you to "choose?" Most times it also guesses perfectly. And for when it doesn't it is much easier and faster to adjust the location of the sample and see the difference in real time as you move the sampled area around. Such functionality does not exist in Elements.
With PSE you can choose your sample point and leave it in the same place for many clone function uses.
Which is a horrible way to dust correct an image.
Plus if you don't do things in the right order, you could be unable undo image adjustment settings in LR if you want to undo them to a time before you did the spot healing and didn't make a Snapshot first. I do my clone/heal on the TIFF, that I have cataloged with LR, in PSE then when I open it in LR, as it always goes to the file on the drive, the dust is gone.
What is preventing someone from dust correcting first in LR before all other edits are done?
