If you're going to shoot off a few hundred RAW shots then I think you'll find processing them in Elements ACR a little on the slow side. LR will provide more controls and a much speedier workflow.
Colin

Colin,
I agree LR is the tool for speedy workflow. What do you think of the following text I just wrote yesterday about Elements workflow in such cases?

Creativity vs workflow
Even if we are in a creative forum, there are times when some planning ahead and workflow choices may help and save a lot of time. Here is a situation you may encounter:
You have just covered a family event, a wedding or similar reportage, which resulted in 500 – 1000 shots. You expect to select 150 – 250 for an online printing service on 4 x 6 in, so that every participant is shown. You want to setup a web gallery with a selection of 50 -100 shots and maybe the same selection optimized for digital frames. Maybe a slideshow? Of course, you are proud of 10 to 20 shots to be printed large with the best possible quality either at home or by a quality laboratory. That's a lot of work, part of which is pleasant and inspiring, part of which time consuming and boring. I add that you shot raw to take no risk with the bride's white satin gown and the available light shots of the dance party...
Here are a few ideas to get you started, supposing you are only using Elements 4 to 6 and ACR 4.0 to 4.3.
The good thing is you have a good idea of the different results to achieve. The technical requirements are not the same for digital frames and posters. However, you don't want to neglect cropping or highlight recovery on the bride's iggown, even for the web.
Now, you are left with 150 -250 shots which you could batch process from raw to jpeg (with multiple files, having set the ACR bit-depth to 8 bits). This is technically feasible, but that's not what you are after. However the process multiple file option will be excellent to save time for tasks which are not creative, such as resizing, compressing, final sharpening and saving in a given folder. Another obvious fact is that the editing of your keepers will mean another treatment, maybe working in aRGB, 16 bits and saving to tiff or PSD layered formats. So you are left with editing output options for standard printing, web and digital frame. The first ones require about 3 megapixels and a compression of 8 – 10. The last ones maybe 800x600 and more compression. If your editing is good enough for printing, no need to waste disk space or uploading time. But you want each individual shot to be correctly cropped, lighting and colour adjusted, with possible local enhancements such as cloning, dodging and burning...
Now, if you have sorted your raw files in different folders according to similarity of treatment, you want to useACR and Elements in the best possible way. Let's take an example, your good lighting afternoon shots are in a special folder. There is a good reason why you should divide this folder in two: shots needing Elements editing after ACR, and those who don't. Let's begin with the latter. Open in ACR, adjust, crop and straighten (ACR 4.2 or 4.3), then click done and go to the next file without opening Elements. A batch job will do the final steps afterwards, since your editing changes are saved in .xmp files. With the files to be further edited in Elements, you click open instead of done and take the time to edit with layers, masks, dodge and burn, specific noise reduction ... then save as jpeg in a new folder without bothering to resize or sharpen. For the keepers which will need special care afterwards, best save as .psd for further use, unless you want to start from scratch with the original raw files. Having sorted the files, the editing steps of the first shot in a folder will be kept for the following edit, provided you have set the default of ACR to 'previous conversions'. The adjustments should be minimal, except cropping and straightening which depend on each individual image. You spare a lot of time by skipping Elements editing when ACR can do the job, which may be 80% of the cases.
The next step will be to use the batch feature (process multiple files) to convert edited raw files (with their .xmp accompanying files or jpegs to the desired format for printing or for the web.

Summary:
Import from card or camera to temporary folder
Browse in organizer. Give a rating and determine categories based on editing similarities. Start rating again to be sure you are keeping only useful shots! The time to do this will be more than compensated afterwards.
Copy each category into its own folder. At this stage, try to separate files which need additonnal edits.
Those needing only ACR treatment are edited and saved ('done') in the same folder. No need to open in Elements.
Those processed in Elements are saved in a new folder.
Each folder is automatically 'batch processed' with 'process multiple files' once for printing, a second time for web. You maywant to keep the intermediate edited jpegs which can produce excellent home prints (maybe adjusting sharpening). Two resulting output folders: print and web.
Last sorting and culling for pictures to keep for web or digital frames.
Uploading files to Internet for printing
Creating web galleries and uploading
Selecting the few 'keepers' and do comprehensive editing and printing, saving as psd or Tiff. Have fun with those!

Michel, that's an amazing workflow. Thanks for sharing it here.

I believe, though, that injecting Lightroom in the mix of tools would certainly cut down the amount of time and effort spent on the front end of this process, as Colin has suggested. It then would come down to cost vs. benefit; does one do this thing often enough to justify the cost of Lightroom? I've just begun to scratch the surface of Lightroom's capabilities, but I'm amazed at how well thought out its processes are.

Michel.....

You're right that planning ahead is crucial if you want good results and don't want to be overwhelmed by the processing issues involved.

You've obviously spent some time thinking about this and the only suggestion I would make is about ' a picture being worth a 1000 words'. Because of the divergent paths needed by the different outputs, if you could put together a flow diagram this would be really useful in supporting your text.

For my own workflow which is based upon a mix of LR and Elements I do the following.

1. Import all RAW images into LR - keywords applied during import. Delete bad images
2. Process the remaining RAW images
3. Make a collection of images intended for Slideshows.
4. Export these as sRGB JPEGS to a specific Slideshow folder ready for use by Proshow.
5. Export all processed images as TIF, ProphotoRGB images to sub folder of originals
6. Import all TIFS into Elements Organiser - select and print as necessary.
7. Any Web images are done directly from LR by means of a collection

At step 6 you could also apply creative editing in Photoshop which I occassionally do.

Colin

Chuck,

I was wondering when you would chime in here. That was a well thought out work flow set out by Michel. I love to see minds at work. I don't know that much about Light Room except that one of it's main functions is batch type processing of files. IMHO the scenario set up by Michel would make the purchase of LR well worth the money.

Colin brings up a point about card failure. I've never had it happen, but I suppose it can. I also assume it would be more likely to happen when the camera is writing to the card and power is lost. My Nikon seems to sense when the battery is low and will not allow the shutter to release. The battery seems to last a minute or two longer before it shuts down completely. I assume it does this to avoid losing data. I'm wondering how many people have had there cards go bad and uder what circumstances?

Gary, if you want another good laugh, look at this one...
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/150-vs- ... camera.htm

I told you, this guy loves to throw grenades. But, it's hard to dispute what he's saying.

Rusty

PS - if you click around his website to find the current "what camera to buy page", you will see his 1st choice (slr) is what you are shooting

I've just begun to use RAW and find it fascinating for making photos you don't want to trust to your camera's processor via Jpeg. That being said,I'll still use Jpeg/fine for the majority of everyday snaps. Nice to have this option. The workflow for Raw that you folks use is very well put together. I know that Chuck mentioned once before that Jpegs could be processed/tweaked using ACR. Has anyone got a workflow worked out for that?
Chas

Hey Jen,
In a nutshell.....I shoot RAW for my portrait work, and I use high quality JPEGs for my sports shoots. I use LR for processing my RAW, then export the images as a DNG file...and for now also a high res JPEG (until I can really figure out what I am doing)....I batch process everything in CS2, and using PSE for my creative work, organizing and uploading to my website. I use a Professional Lexar 2gb 133x memory card (I have two) and recently purchased the Professional Lexar 8GB 300x memory card. When I did football games or soccer games, I did just fine using my two 2GB cards.. but I did have a couple of my 1GB cards handy too just in case the game was exceptional with action..just make sure your write speed is fast enough, because with your 40D and shooting in high continuous mode (6 fps), it is going to hum fast....

Denise

Denise.....

You say you shoot in RAW; process in LR; then export a DNG. Are you aware that you can do a conversion directly to DNG when you import the RAW? It would give you one less file and the DNG is just as good as the original RAW.

Colin

that is good to know, Colin. Thanks.... I did see that button somewhere while importing Do you then export as a DNG file or a JPEG. And if in JPEG, what values are putting in for exporting. I'm still very uncomfortable using RAW exclusively.... but it is a learning process, right?

Here's what I do in my processing routine:

1. Import directly from the camera as DNG
2. Do my adjustments in LR (still as DNG)
3. Pictures I am going to do more work on, export to PSE5 as .psd (some like TIFF)
4. When I am done editing and save and close out of PSE5, I keep it as a PSD at this point.
5. Once back in LR I flag the edited PSD file as a "Pick"
6. Now when I am done editing all my pictures, I can filter on the picked PSD files, and depending on what I want to do from there export them as JPG to another folder.

And at this point I am usually sorting which pictures I may upload, so I will assign the ones I want to upload to SmugMug a 4 star rating so I can filter on that when I done making my choices and export those to my upload folder. Once uploaded, I empty out that folder but keep the star and pick ratings in LR if I need to go back to them later.

This leaves me with 3 copies: the original DNG file, an edited PSD file, and JPGs of my 4 star favorites. Right now I am keeping all the files on an external HD. Depending on the pictures, I may delete the PSD files or not. I may or may not export all the PSDs as JPGs, depending again on what I want to do with the pictures.

I then backup everything to another EHD and the program I use to do that matches the backup files to the active files exactly. So pictures I end up deleting on my working EHD get deleted on my backup EHD. And one of these days I may get real ambitious and start burning older pictures that I am essentially done with to DVDs.

It sounds complicated, but I have been doing it for awhile now and it is second nature. And flagging the PSD files as "picks" makes sorting much easier after I am done editing a particular shoot.

HTH