Jeoff, Sniper, Nikojorg, Kikashi, Pegeli, Schewe, Rwk49, Digitaldog and finally Wolfnwl - phew how do you guys come up with these sci-fi names, influenced by star wars?. I did not want to appear in-polite. I have unfortunately been away and very tied up these last weeks and did not respond to you guys for all your input. It is very appreciated - really. A big thankyou for the snippets of insight that you guys gave and yes it was very useful. i use Adobe Raw very heavily and then tidying up in Photoshop with a couple of layer masks and of course I very rarely use curves - prefer blending and masks. So i will miss that ability to fine tune. The idea of brightness control sounds too much like levels which I have never used in 4 years except for tuning alpha masks - I will miss that too. But I suppose I will need to get a trial copy of lightroom and edit with a known reference point and see if I can duplicate satisfactorily the image I edited in my old workflow.
You know I would not even be bothering for lightroom if it was not for the heavily priced photoshop and the need for so much RAM. By the way, does lightroom offer the same functionality as photoshop with respect to alocating a specific amount of ram? If not what are the approximate requirements of lightroom, is it resource hungry? This of course would be a huge benefit for me.
Once again thankyou for all those that replied.
Kindest regards and hope you all have a delightful christmas... with snow of course. We've got it here already in south west Ireland.