Elementary
Sunday, January 25, 2009 17:50
Software can get quite expensive, as such it’s always nice finding alternatives to save a few quid. As much a fan of open source as I am GIMP is still a bit weird for people and hasn’t taken much hold, Adobe Photoshop is therefore predominantly perceived as the one and only for photographers, web heads and as a complimentary tool to Illustrator for most design studios, it’s feature set is deep and extensive…..however so it is it’s price at around £400-£500 (unless you qualify for educational discount)……however there is an alternative, and an extremely capable one at that – we’re looking at Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.
Being a long term photographer myself and having also provided professional heritage digitisation support for the Science Museum group (for 9 years) I’ve had exposure (no pun intended) to the depth of features required for both personal, contemporary (artistic) and archive image processing. Full blown Photoshop is ideal for all areas, and more, but it’s the ‘and more’ which the vast majority of users up to semi-pro level (and perhaps even beyond) don’t really need to pay for (e.g Curves, CMYK options and a few correction tools).
Photoshop Elements 6 is available for around an 8th of the cost of full blown Photoshop (CS4), yes, quite a saving indeed, and you know, I really like it, I also really rate it. The interface has a nice grey Lightroom-esque feel and offers not only an almost full Photoshop feature set but presents the regularly used tools for general editing via groovy ‘one-stop shop’ side bar access. The side bar too offers a range of really useful ‘home-usery’ wizard stylie bits and bobs like photobooks (hey, we all enjoy a bit of fun here and there..!), the Project Bin viewing bar along the bottom of the window is again also great and offers a direct share link for creating a Web Gallery, Emailing images, ordering prints or burning onto CD/DVD….dead nice, it really brings out and simplifies many of the deep rooted Photoshop actions, PDF slide show creation for example is another easy accessible quick feature, as is batch processing.
Even without the huge price differential I would strongly recommend Elements as an image editor of choice, however at such a saving it’s a no brainer (unless you’re a GIMP), I have both on my Mac and to be honest I invariably fire up Elements.
*NOTE* - iPhoto I haven’t mentioned – although both intuitive and useable with great integration into both the iLife suite and resulting Mac world it’s more of a happy snappers application than a tool for *real* image processing.
