PS vs. PSE

I have been using PSE since version 2. I currently own Version 7 and have had great success with it. I am still learning new ways to use the program and with the help of some plug-ins (like a freebie layer mask) I have been pretty much able to do what I want to do - except HDR. I am looking at Photomatrix for that.

Having said that, I don't know what I don't know. What does the full version of Photoshop offer over PSE. Is it worth the 10X increase in price.

Thank you for your replies.

Good question. I'm still on PSE 2; couldn't stand 3. Is it really better now? And I use Photomatix for HDR.

The most significant difference between PS and PSE is support for actions. PSE affords very limited access to actions and no ability to create them.

PSE does not contain curves adjustments (although there are add-ons that provide this ability).

I use an add-on to generate layer masks in PSE, I've never been able to figure out how to create them natively.

Many of the tools available in both PSE and PS have more options for controlling the output in PS.

That being said, I'm a very happy Elements user (version 4.0) and have no desire to upgrade to Photoshop. I upgraded my Elements version once (from 2.0) because I felt version 4.0 provided significantly improved functionality. I haven't seen a compelling reason to upgrade since (and numerous reasons NOT to upgrade).

--
Phil
http://www.pbase.com/pgilston

Photoshop has several advantages over PE, and please be understanding I may be behind the times on which version has what. I use Photoshop cs4, having upgraded from CS, to CS3 to CS4. I have loved all of the versions. Ps offers more usability in curves, layers and layer groups. But I think that for 95% of the people, 95% of the time PE is an excellent program, and I recommend it to everyone that asks me about editing software.

I have to agree- Unless you are a true - blue Photoshop user, you can do 98% of what you need to do in Photoshop Elements. For the average user, Elements is great. Yes there are a few easier ways to do things in PhotoShop but again is worth all the extra $$$ just to say I use Photoshop ? I use PhotoShop CS4 however I help teach Elements 7.0 in a club setting. I also usually recommend Elements for the regular user. Great Program!!
--
Steinr98

oilman said:

Is it worth the 10X increase in price.

Click to expand...

Very roughly - using British prices, and ignoring the dearer PS versions - you might view the costs of using the two programs over a number of years as follows:

Photoshop Elements - Initially £100, updating to latest version each year £80.

Over the first 6 years, taking every other update, costs £100+£80+£80 = £260 for 6 years (£43 per year), then £40 per year.

Photoshop proper - £555 then £165 per update (roughly every 2 years).

Cost over 6 years is £555+£165+£165 = £885 for 6 years (say £148 per year), and then £83 per year.

Keen amateur - learn with PSE, upgrade if and when a good offer comes along:

Year 1 - Photoshop Elements £100, upgrade PSE to full PS (in, say, Year 3) £350, Year 5 etc Photoshop update £165.

Cost over 6 years is £100+£350+£165 = £615 for 6 years (say £103 per year) and then £83 per year.

Our own circumstances determine how we look at this - but you might say any of these:

(a) Over the next six years, using full PS would cost 3.5 times as much as Elements

(b) starting with full Photoshop from day 1 requires a one-off investment of £400 to "join the club" - after that each year's use costs 80 pence a week more than Elements.

(c) full Photoshop is an expensive luxury, £150 annually for the next six years, and a huge £625 more than Elements.

(d) over the next 6 years I may well shoot 12,000 pictures (substitute your own estimate by all means!). Processing them will cost an average of 7 pence with full PS, 2p each with Elements, or 5p if I take the 'keen amateur' route.

I guess you pays your money and takes your choice!

Peter
--
Peter - on the green island of Ischia
http://www.pbase.com/isolaverde

PS worth the extra money over PSE - I do not know.

For me the key qurestion / problem was to hit too often to the limitations of PSE, and thus today PS CS4 (sticked to PSE till the CS4 was out to "save" one update cost).

Unless you have real and well understood reason to get PS (and lots of money) I'd recommend PSE as with that you can do most you need in photography. Limited 16b handling has been my biggest vexation.

PS My original reason to move to CS4 was the need to update my video SW bundle, and I have to say the integration in the tool Premiere+Encore+PS is really nice (and reasonably nice offer by Adobe to update to CS4 Production Premium package added with LR2). PSE will go to our "family PC" where need photo handling only.

oilman said:

I have been using PSE since version 2. I currently own Version 7 and
have had great success with it. I am still learning new ways to use
the program and with the help of some plug-ins (like a freebie layer
mask) I have been pretty much able to do what I want to do - except
HDR. I am looking at Photomatrix for that.

Having said that, I don't know what I don't know. What does the full
version of Photoshop offer over PSE. Is it worth the 10X increase in
price.

Thank you for your replies.

Click to expand...

I don't think PSE has a channel mixer, a tool that I find essential for converting to B&W. Could be wrong though?
--
http://www.scottwylie.co.uk

scotbot said:

I don't think PSE has a channel mixer, a tool that I find essential
for converting to B&W. Could be wrong though?

Click to expand...

I think the PSE capabilities to handle the channels is pretty limited in general.

One of the "stops" I hit once was the inability to use color channels separately in mask creation, which is sometimes very handy.

You may though be able to get some "extras" as plugins like I once found such to enable tone curves for PSE. For B/W conversion I guess there are plug-ins (though do not know if any good+free). If you start to purchase plug-ins to overcome the PSE limitations you easilly end to spend quite a lot of money.

There are also lots of plug-ins for this

Photoshop Elements 7 has a color to B/W conversion function that works in a way that is very similar to the "channel mixer" that was used in past versions of Photoshop. That is, you can independently adjust the amount of the red, green, and blue channels to optimize the contrast of the B/W image. Photoshop, however, has moved past the "channel mixer," as newer versions of Photoshop have an even better B/W conversion function, which essentially makes the old channel mixer obsolete. Therefore, in this area, Elements jumps to a base that Photoshop has left behind.

In the area of curves, Photoshop Elements 6 & 7 have a slightly improved "adjust color curves" function that originally started in PSE5. This function works on 16-bit files, and is decent enough for anyone who wants to do very basic curves adjustments, without getting into the complexity of (1) using more than three points on a curve or (2) adjusting the curve of individual color channels. If you need more than that, try one of the FREE plugins that provide functionality of the full Photoshop version of curves.

For masking, get the FREE "Grant's Tools" layer masks and you can do most of what Photoshop will allow with masking. Grant's Tools also has channels so that you can create selections using individual channels if you need to. It's also FREE.

The bottom line is that, although Adobe has tried to limit the ability of Elements users to add Photoshop functionality, there is still much that is available and FREE that will allow you to expand the ability of Elements to the point that most folks will not need to use Photoshop. With the FREE trial, it's worth trying it out to see if you can live without Photoshop.

Of course, if the money is just burning a hole in your pocket, just buy Photoshop to start with. My $.02.

... there's the Organizer!

Whilst many have nothing to say in its favour, for me the Organizer is a highly useful partner to the Editor - one that makes it a real doddle to find and select individual images (or groups of them) from my 30-year collection of 17,000+ pictures.

Although I use few of its features apart from tagging and searching, two particular benefits are worth mentioning: not only does it integrate well with the Editor, but also the two are always in step with oneanother when it comes to OS requirements, cameras supported, RAW updates etc etc - so there's never a wait of weeks (or months) for one or the other to 'catch up'.

Peter
--
Peter - on the green island of Ischia
http://www.pbase.com/isolaverde

Organizer is a help? That's why I'm still at 2.0 with the Browser. Tell more.

sailonset said:

Organizer is a help? That's why I'm still at 2.0 with the Browser.
Tell more.
--

Click to expand...

Personally, I was very pleased when Adobe moved from PSE2 to PSE3 as I'd previously been using Photoshop Album as a 'filing system' - and found the integration of the two a big improvement.

PSE3 (I'm talking the PC/Win version here) kept the Editor's Browser - which was convenient as this was able to display a good-sized version of the image (including RAWs), making it possible to review and select good pictures for conversion and editing without the need to import them into the Organizer first (a process I used to prefer putting off until after I'd dumped all the bad or unwanted images, and done all the 'obvious' editing - so I only brought 'wanted' photos into the Organizer).

(What I'd not been noticing though was the huge structure of folders that was building up, containing many GBs of these Browser preview files, though I did become aware of the time it was taking to create them, and search through them - as well as the space they needed during backups, their effect on defrags etc etc).

The Editor's Browser facility was removed in either PSE4 or 5 - and when I eventually upgraded to PSE6 I quite missed it, as the Editor's replacement routines for "File, Open" and RAW conversions now only used an Explorer-sized thumbnail, making hard to tell what the image looked like until it was in ACR. For a while I changed to using IrfanView as a previewer, with the PSE Editor set as its External Editor.

At some point though I swapped over to Adobe's way of working - bringing everything into the Organizer by importing them - choosing an image to work on there and then using the "Full Edit" link to transfer into Editor mode. This has only been practical since I fitted a second GB of RAW as previously having the two processes open at the same time slowed things down too much. Annoyingly, PSE6 doesn't like me having too many RAWs in the Catalog, which is why I'm looking at v7).

So that's how I use the Organizer - in the next post I'll show some 'whys'!

Peter

--
Peter - on the green island of Ischia
http://www.pbase.com/isolaverde

Using the Organizer

I mainly use the Organizer as a way of viewing, organising and finding my image files beyond the limits of name, date and location offered by WinXP.

I can see that this isn't much good if you're mainly shooting unrelated events (like dozens, or hundreds, of weddings), but it's very handy if you've shot lots of the same people, places or things taken over the years.

Tags that identify an individual characteristic of the image (perhaps who, where, what, how etc) are at the heart of this, and over the years I've built up a fairly detailed structure.

The top layer consists of broad categories, including "Buildings"



The second layer is broader - here, the first part of the list of "Buildings" types



Third layer, more of that list, showing the further detail for some "Buildings" types



Searches

Searches of the Catalog will find all the files with (or without) specific tags.

Here, the first results from a simple search for pictures tagged with "Canon S400"



Complicated searches - here the first few of 121 images tagged with "Canon S400" plus "Ischia" plus "Wine and Food"



"Find by visual similarity" - from the most alike to the least, from a chosen starting image



Organizer tag details can be written into the IPTC keyword fields of JPEG, TIFF and PSD files



This info is then readable and searchable by other programs, including the XP and Vista "Search" routine.



Hope that may be of interest - there are more screengrabs of these and other processes here: http://www.pbase.com/isolaverde/elements

Peter
--
Peter - on the green island of Ischia
http://www.pbase.com/isolaverde

n/t

Yes! Maybe I can give a stimulus to the economy with the latest PSE!
Have 3 Gb memory.

Isola Verde said:

Photoshop proper - £555 then £165 per update (roughly every 2 years).

Click to expand...

Your assumption is that everyone updates every other year; they don't.

I've been using Photoshop from version one and never upgraded every two years.

In the past, I downloaded free versions of Adobe Elements, and could just never become comfortable with the interface after using Photoshop for such a long time. There is nothing wrong with the interface, I just personally prefer Photoshop (I haven't tried the latest version of Elements).

My last upgrade went from Photoshop 7 to CS3, and I'm very glad I did. For me, the Shadow/Highlights adjustment alone was worth the cost of the upgrade (and yes, the upgrade was expensive). I know Elements has a similar adjustment but last time I looked, it wasn't as sophisticated as the one in CS3.

There are other improvements in CS3 over PS7 that I always hoped for so I'm happy with my decision. I haven't even looked at CS4 because CS3 has everything I need (and I think the system requirements may be more demanding).

Before deciding the OP may want to try a trial version of the software.

If I never used Photoshop and was starting out today, for sure I'd get Elements. It's a fine program, a lot easier to learn, definitely much easier on the pocketbook, and you can always migrate in the future to Photoshop if you want a more sophisticated program.

--
gail ~ http://www.pbase.com/gailb
My digital camera BLOGs: Canon XSi, SD890; Pany FZ18 & more:
http://www.digicamhelp.com/camera-logs/index.php

I wish PSE 5 had a way to disable it. Every time I save a JPG, the damn program wants to add it to the organizer.

The organizer is designed for the average photo takers, not people very into photography. Lightroom is a far better solution for RAW developing and photo organizing and cataloguing.

Gail,

My title "Maybe not quite ten times......?" - as well as most of my post - revolved about PS not being ten times as expensive to use as Elements, in response to the OP having asked "Is it worth the 10X increase in price."

To make a comparison, some assumptions were necessary.

I would have thought it obvious that those wouldn't match the upgrade choices of every user, but thank you for making it clear that they didn't.

Peter

--
Peter - on the green island of Ischia
http://www.pbase.com/isolaverde