Photo shop elements 7 vs light room which one to buy???

Question

Well Ive watched alot of tutorials  and both seem to have some cool feateures.  I am a amature at photo editing.  I cant seem to make up my mind on which program to use.  I have been using photo shop elemts 3 for a few years but am not great with it.  I have taken couses on photoshop cs and found it is alot more program than what i have time to learn.  I want to be able to orginize adjust and share my photos.  I want to be able to take several photos and turn them into one.  Can the two programs work together? 
I have about 8000 photos I am going to have to reimport, tag and orginize I just as well uprade or change programs before I take the time to do this.  Any input form anyone that has used both would be greatly appriciated.
Randy

Answer 1

PSE and LR can work together:  You would import your photos into LR and
catalog/keyword/non-destructively-adjust them, then you can do right-click
then Edit in Photoshop Elements to make further destructive adjustments to a
copy of the LR-adjusted photo.
PSE7 is less than $100.  LR2 is $300.  PS11 is $600.  I have all three and
use LR most of the time and tend to use PS to do any further adjustments
that I find necessary, which isn't that often, so most things are taken care
of entirely in LR.
You can download a trial of both PSE7 and LR2 and see how well you like
either or both.  You cannot share the keywords between the two, so you will
want to use LR to catalog and organize things if you have it, or perhaps PSE
to organize things if you don't have LR, although I've never done this so
can't really compare the two.
As far as wanting to take multiple photos and create one from them, do you
mean something like a collage or scrapbook pages, are do you mean taking an
object like a person from one photo and putting it into a background of
another, a composite photo that still looks like one photo?  Being a
consumer-level program, PSE may be able to make simple collage-type things,
but you need the full professional-level Photoshop to do the layering and
masking involved in creating a composite photograph from parts of others
that you have extracted.