Photoshop Elements (PSE) 4 v PSE 5

[ejg62]

Has anyone upgrade from PSE 4 to PSE 5? Is it worth the upgrade? What are the added features of PSE 5.0?

I have not heard much about PSE 5.0 and was curious on the added features.

Thanks

Jim G

 

[Peter Guy]

I took the plunge about a week ago. I opted to upgrade primarily because the "slide show" function appears to be a lot more advanced.

I've seen, and played with, the "curves" function that 5 has -- dumbed down from PS but I think it will be pretty helpful.

 

[GrandpaScuba]

I took the plunge about a week ago. I opted to upgrade primarily because the "slide show" function appears to be a lot more advanced.

I've seen, and played with, the "curves" function that 5 has -- dumbed down from PS but I think it will be pretty helpful.

I have Photoshop 7 and Photoshop Elements (4, I think) on my XP laptop. When I switched to a Mac for my Desktop, I bought Photoshop Elements 5 for that. I haven't really noticed anything specific that is different between 4/5. Most of the things that I've noticed with 5, I've chocked up to "Mac" differences.

Despite having both Photoshop and Elements, I nearly always use Elements. It really has most of the tools I need. The main thing that Photoshop 7 has, that I use, is the "Batch" function.

 

[ejg62]

I've seen, and played with, the "curves" function that 5 has -- dumbed down from PS but I think it will be pretty helpful.

What is the "curves" functionality?

Thanks

Jim

 

[Charlie99]

It allows you to have an arbitrary mapping of input levels to output levels.

Everything you can do with the "Levels" control you can do with curves, and then some. Think of it as something along the line of Levels, but rather than having just the two endpoints and one middlepoint, you can control an arbitrary number of sliders. The user interface is a graph of input on one axis and output on the other axis. No change is a straight 45 degree line. You can bend or "curve" the line as desired.

I use an add-on version of curves in PSE3 from the CD that comes with the book "The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 3" by Richard Lynch. It is an interesting book in that it strips photo manipulation back down to the bare naked first principles and then builds things back up. It also has a lot of good info about RBGL separations and such things.