I will just speak towards the underlined portions above;
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Also, just want to confirm that Elements does not have the amount of features to edit the pics with?"
PS Elements is a stripped down version of full PhotoShop, without the majority of graphic designer tools, intended for users who only need to adjust photos. You Q seems to be missing the few words, like "compared to LR and/or full PS," needed to make it a proper question/sentence. If we assume the few words in my previous sentence are supposed to be in your Q, with regards to earlier Elements, "curves" and "actions" are a couple functions that were not available, compared to full PS, but are on newer versions of Elements, IIRC. Layers seems to be available with my Elements 4.
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And when you say that LR is non-destrucitve, I take it you mean that as you save any changes to the orginal picture the jpeg file doesn't erode?"
Again, your wording is somewhat confusing to me, but then again my original files are not .jpg. I have always wondered about this claim. I shoot underwater photos in .orf (Olympus Raw File). I now use Adobe Raw to download and convert my day's photo's to .dnf (Digital Negative File), into a folder I name with the day's date. After making adjustments with Elements, the adjusted file is saved as .psd, .tif or .jpg; I chose which one(s). Before Adobe Raw, the original .orf's were/are downloaded/stored in a similarly named/cataloged folder. I have been using mostly Elements since ~'02 and I still have all my original .orf's or .dng's in exactly the same condition as when they came off the camera/card.
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I spoke with Joe Liburdi who thinks Elements would be a sufficient program to use."
Joe has been a prominent underwater photographer for decades and it he thinks Elements "would be a sufficient program" that is significant, IMHO.
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Yes, I was comparing to other programs as you mentioned. Again, sorry to create so much confusion, but it seems as if you understood what I was asking and answered the question appropriately. Joe is the man from what I have been told. Lucky for me he is only a few miles away. While speaking with Joe, it seemed he prefers programs geared towards photographers vs. graphic designers. The programs as described to me that are more graphic design type seem fun, but way too many features I probably won't use; not to mention the costs.
Re not caring about the cataloging feature...It is so much simpler managing files/folders/image collections in Lightroom than using Windows Explorer or Picasa or any other program I have seen, that I completely dumped my own method for filing images and re-created a much more elaborate, but simpler to implement and manage, method in Lightroom.
Re Lightroom being non-destructive.... Lightroom never does anything to the original image. Every editing change or change in metadata concerning the image is stored in a database file and associated with the original image. After making "edits" you are looking at the updated computer screen version of the original file with the list of "edits" you made imposed on the screen version of the original file. As indicated, that list of "edits" is in the database; the database contains a pointer to the original image, but no changes are ever applied to the original image. No version of the edited image ever goes onto the computer disk unless you elect to export the edited image as a new file to be saved in a format of your choosing. I shoot with a small Canon a570is directly into DNG format using the CHDK hack. These files remain untouched on my hard drive no matter how much they appear to have been edited by Lightroom.
That's what I was figuring when I was playing with LR. This answers my question about eroding the original file. Seems I may have not used proper terminology in my questions, but you were able to figure out what I was referring to. Thanks
