PSE 7 or PS7?

[ingrid]

I know PSE 7 is brand new and so folk will have little experience of it, but if you had the choice between PS7 and PSE7 which would you choose? I suppose a better question would be PS7 or PSE6?

I shoot JPEG but have the potential to shoot Canon RAW and am very new to this post-processing lark so have no real experience of any program. I rely on your experience and informed comment

 

[CT]

Well my view on this is that almost any editing programme you care to mention is probably about 60% overkill at least for photographic purposes. Far more important is to pick an application and stick with it - swapping and changing, at least in the early stages, can get very confusing indeed. I use Paint Shop Pro 7 which is several years old now, but does everything I need of it, and I'm very familiar with it so don't feel any great urge to change, despite having tried two later versions of the programme.

I don't use Photoshop, but my gut feeling would be to go for PS7 which is a complete package, while Essentials is always a cut-down version, but in all honesty, I think you're worrying about nothing, any processing package at the levels of these will do all you're likely to need of it.

 

[AndyWest]

Photoshop 7 is fairly old hat now as we are onto CS4 at more than £500.

Photoshop Elements 7 is not much different to Elements 5 or 6 but PS Elements7 is only £50ish. PS Elements 7 will do your raw files brilliantly but i find that once that's done the rest of the programme gives little in the way of editing the image further. If i want to do more i have to open the image in Photoshop 7 which i have. Photoshop 7 will do just about everything except RAW files, for that you will need PS elements 7, CS3 or 4 or Lightroom2. (which is very popular!)

Most people use either Elements or Lightroom to do the main editing to the RAW file then goto Photoshop 7/CS3/CS4 for the bits they want to do which they can't in the other progs.

 

[Dunstan]

The latet version of The Gimp is free and is very good and there's a plug-in for RAW conversion. If you've got a fast computer, RawTherapee is a very good free RAW converter. It's worth trying the freebies to check how much PP you want to do.