PS Elements enough?

[thorsten]

Thank you all for your answers.

Robert, thank you very much for the hint with upgrading an old version... this really could be less expensive than full version CS2. Before doing this, I'll contact Adobe regarding platform-change. It would really be annoying to spend so much money on a product, which doesn't run natively on my Intel-Mac.

Besides the Photoshop-story, I will try out the Gimp for sure... heard good things about it before, but never tried.

Thanks again,

 

[Peter Klein]

Another vote for Picture Window Pro. Doesn't do layers, but has its own way to do what you do with layers. Other than that, does pretty much everything Photshop does. And it was designed by a photographer, for photographers; not by engineers, for graphic desgners and prepress technicians. And at 1/6 the cost of Photoshop.

http://www.dl-c.com

--Peter

 

[titrisol]

PS Thorsten, gimpguru.org has lots of tutorials on how to make photography retouching using the GIMP.
Eric Jeschke is a great guy!

 

[Ronald M]

Curves are missing. There is a fill flash/ backlight control to sort of make it up.

Some layer masking is either harder or you can`t do it. Adjustments only effect the entire layer if you can`t mask some off.

Actions are totally missing. They are nice if you set up a routine you do to every pic. Just call up the action and all the proper layers appear.

Isolating and removing portions of the pic are easier. Say you want to drop out the sky and show a different one. A color selection ( blue) can be made. No color selections in Elements. You are forced to the magic wand or lasoo. I love dropping in a beautiful cloudy sky if it fits. Or change a grey no color to maybe a pale blue.

Curves is not a big loss. There is no corresponding function in a wet darkroom. I refer you to Jay Arraich tutorials for detailed explaination.

Go to Radiant Images and go thru the tutorials and you will be impressed with all that can be done. Elements is good and will make many happy, but it is a toy compared to CS2.

You can correct lens distortion curved lines, and I am not talking perspective corrections that is in both.

 

[aad]

I downloaded Curves from Earthbound Light-I haven't used it too much, but if it's what you want, it's easily available free-

 

[DougK]

I've done fine with PS Elements 2, haven't really found much that I need to do with image editing that it can't do. It would be nice to have a full version of Photoshop but I can't really justify the cost. Now that I'm back on a PC, though, I may give Paint Shop Pro a try.