photoshop elements vs. the real thing

cfleck

cfleck

tired
i've decided i probably need to get photoshop but it is so expensive and i'm not exactly a professional in that area so i think it would be a waste. this cued my interest towards elements. anyone have any experience with this? i'm just looking to be able to do some lazy image editing mostly for the web and some light hobby stuff. suggestions are more than welcome!
 
If you can swing it, go with the full version. Otherwise, maybe look into Macromedia Fireworks. You can do alot with Fireworks...goto www.macromedia.com and download their free trial, see if that'll do what you need. It's a bit cheaper then the full version of Photoshop.
 
Tuh...

Go with Elements. For what you described that you want to do, it's still overkill, but that's the nature of the program... you get a lot of bang for 99 bucks. It lacks some of the higher-end features of PS, like working in color spaces besides RGB, but for your purposes PSE will plenty.
 
why not just go to the adobe site and download the one month trial of each? that should give you plenty of time to make an informed decision based upon your needs.

(i'll admit they are rather large files, but i would think they could be acquired overnight even on dialup)
 
Or, if you don't need layer support, you could mess around with Graphic Converter. Besides being able to open just about any graphics file, it can do a lot of manipulation.
 
This is something I've been thinking about recently. I'm very familiar with the full Photoshop (from work) but can't really justify the expense for home use.

From everything I have read, Elements really does seem to be a bit of bargain. It seems all you miss out on is CMYK and 16 bit precision (Anything else of note??).

For home use this is fine. I'd be using it for touching up digital camera pics, doing some graphics for personal web-sites, and just general mucking around (I find it very therapeutic warping and mucking around with photos!).

That's it - I've made my mind up - I'm going to buy it pronto!

And for what it's worth - I've never considered Fireworks a direct comparison with Photoshop. All the vector based stuff in Fireworks makes it more comparable with a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator. I could be wrong as I haven't really used FW much (a designer at work swears by it) but I always get the impression you can't really do stuff on a pixel by pixel level if you need to. The actual final image is 'hidden' behind all the vectors if you see what I mean (!!??!).

As for Graphic Converter, whilst I'm sure it's good for what it is (and great that it's cheap) I've never really got on with it and always end up wishing I was using the 'real thing' (i.e. Photoshop).

My 2 cents.
 
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