In recent days, I have been playing around with Photoshop Elements 7, doing the same sort of things that I have been doing with Elements 5. Reassuringly, I can still find my way around, even if the screen furniture has been moved about a little. My Pentax K10D is recognised and I am able to set white balance to get sensible results. On the images that I was testing, things started to look too warm in the Cloudy and Shade settings but that’s all part and parcel of processing photos taken in early November. The results of my exertions look decent enough and you can see them in a post on my hillwalking blog.

I realise that Adobe has been promoting the ability to easily airbrush unwanted objects from images and enhance blue skies but there’s no point having all of that if functionality available in previous versions does not work as expected. Thankfully, this is largely the case but there are a few niggles. I have working the new Elements on a Windows XP SP3 virtual machine running in VirtualBox 2.04 on Ubuntu 8.10 so I don’t know if that contributed in any way to what I encountered. One gigabyte of memory is allocated to the VM. The files were stored in the Ubuntu file system and accessed using VirtualBox’s functionality for connecting through to the host file system. File access was fine but I was unable to directly open a file for full editing from the Organiser, something that I have doing very happily with Elements 5. I also noted a certain instability in the application and using the hand tool to get to the top left hand corner of an image sent the thing into a loop, again something that Elements 5 never does. Otherwise, things work as they should but what I saw points to the need for an update to correct any glitches like these and I hope that there is one. For now, I will persevere and see if I can make use of any additional functionality along the way.

Despite the rampant progress of digital photography, I have continued to stick with film and sit astride the fence. That is something that I wish to continue but my most recent trips into the outdoors have seen me use my Pentax K10D exclusively. That, however, could be something to do with the subject matter. My most recent trot took me into what might be described as featureless moorland, a tricky subject to capture in the best way. So, possibly because of the lesser likelihood of success, I stuck with digital since any lack of success costs less. Previous trips took me out and about locally where I live and I seem to be more likely to use digital, possibly because I have been around the area a lot with my film camera anyway. Also, the vistas, as pleasant as they are, do not possess the drama of the likes of Highland Scotland, the English Lake District, or the mountainous parts North Wales.

That does lead to the impression that I am keeping film for the new and dramatic stuff and it may be true. it is, however, not entirely deliberate and I will continue to take both digital and film cameras with me on my excursions. My reason for taking a DSLR is that I want to put some photos into my posts on my outdoors blog and the world of digital easily speeds that process; my laggardness with getting films processed would add to the time taken too. And film? There is still a certain something about getting a print done for a photo album and the process does force me to print my photos, something that is not a compulsion in the digital world. There is also a greater feeling of permanance with film, a format that has been with us in its various guises for over a hundred years. With the pace of change in the world of computing, would the likes of DNG hold its own for that long?