After a session with Photoshop CS2 and a preview of CS3’s capabilities, I went and got myself a permanent copy of Elements 5 after seeing the similarities between Scott Kelby’s books on Elements 5 and CS2. In any event, I fail to justify the cost of CS2 with CS3 being imminent and the attractions of Elements 5 were too much to ignore. I may yet go for CS3, but I’ll stick with Elements 5 for now.
The similarities between the different members of the Photoshop family are eerie. Once I got used to finding some things in different places from where they are in CS2, I quickly found myself at home in Elements. The biggest miss that I found was the lack of an adjustment layer for editing curves. Otherwise, everything else is as I would hope to find it, and the sliders for curves adjustment in Elements make up for the absence of an associated adjustment layer. Bicubic resampling, an enhancement since Photoshop 7, is as per CS2 and my new workflow worked without too many changes. I took advantage of Kelby’s advice when using Camera Raw and used the Adjust Sharpness feature in place of the Unsharp Mask to get what I perceive to be good results. Everything seemed to work fine for the test digital photo that I was processing for my other blog. I am not totally abandoning my examinations of Elements’ big brother, though; the smart layers feature looks interesting, especially for non-destructive sharpening.