Technology Tales

On Photoshop Elements 7

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.