Photoshop 5.0LE or Elements 2.0?

Are there any book or good web pages for learning to use Photoshop

5.0LE? My brother gave me a copy, that came with a scanner he

bought, he didn't need it. I have never used any photo editing

software before. I have 35mm print film scanned at 3000x2000 by my

pro-shop. Would it be better to purchase elements and just forget

about 5.0LE?

 

Mark

<I>Would it be better to purchase elements and just forget about 5.0LE?</I>

<P>Yes, get Photoshop Elements 2.0

Don't trash LE, because it does have Curves. Go to

http://www.gurusnetwork.com/tutorials/photoshop/curves1.html

tolearn more about this powerful tool. LE cannot handle high bit, and has other shortcomings, but I think it's worth having to add Curves to what you can do in Elements 2.

I have both. After trying Elements out a bit, I do all my work

in 5.0LE. Largely because it has the "curves" command.

Elements has a prettier UI, and perhaps may be a teeny bit easier

to get started with, but it's a lot slower to start up, and

I find that 5.0LE is more capable.

Actually LE does have high bit, just to a very limited extent.

Paint Shop Pro is another alternative. Unlike Elements, it has curves, along with adjustment layers and a great many of the photography-related "advanced" features of the full Photoshop. It also has a lot of automated hand-holding for newbies. The price is comparable to Elements, and it has the possible advantage of supporting a worthy competitor to Adobe.

 

Paint Shop Pro has several genuine weaknesses. Its support for 16-bit images is limited to reading them and converting them to 8 bits. It doesn't support CMYK editing or color spaces other than sRGB. And its support for color management is limited to what Windows provides. I don't know how many of those features Elements has, but if you genuinely need need them you probably need to shell out the bucks to Adobe for Photoshop.

 

Photoshop LE is, as its name implies, a very "Limited Edition." It's ancient and intentionally crippled. It's designed to give scanner manufacturers a cheap way to bundle a minimal capability for editing and printing scans. In some cases (such as my Canon FS4000US) it seems to be there because they use a TWAIN driver that can only be run inside an application. It isn't designed to be used, but more as a somewhat functional "bannerware" advertisement for the full Photoshop (Elements didn't exist when LE came out). In your case, it might be worth what you paid for it. But you'd be much better off spending a little for a real image editing program, such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Elements.

Interesting. My freebie copy of Photoshop LE 4.0.1 doesn't have curves; it is copyright 1996; and I believe it is a whimped down version of Full bore Photoshop 4.0. This freebie Photoshop LE 4.0.1 came bunded with a Canon FS 27<B>10</B> ; which we got many years back. Ancient LE 4.0.1 has limited 16 bit support. <BR><BR>The elemnets 2.0 is a decent program; modern; and is only 52 bucks at the deep discount stores here. We have a legal copy here; which is used sometimes to understand what our customers use. <BR><BR>Sometimes the LE versions that come with scanners have an upgrade coupon; which allows upgrading to full photoshop. Our scanners bundled LE version had this.

You can add curves and other niceties to Elements 2.0 by buying the book <a href="http://hiddenelements.com/">The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 2</a>. I find that preferable to 5.0LE which doesn't have color management. On the other hand, as has already been mentioned, Paint Shop Pro 8 does also a decent job, albeit with the 8 bit limitation, which the other two also have, in any case.