Few questions about Elements 5.0 (compared to 4.0)

[jlana]

Hi, we are in need of imaging software at my work, and since Photoshop is so expensive and GIMP just sucks so much it would be great to have some compromise at a decent price, which leads into Elements 5.0

It seems that there is no trial available for 5.0, I only found one for 4.0 which is just installed.. I've used Photoshop CS for a while at home, so Elements seems like good stuff, but since I can't test 5.0, there are few questions to ask:

- Is 5.0 superheavy as 4.0? What's the main point in theming the whole GUI, I mean about the custom cleartype'ish fonts and menus - this computer has 1gb memory and 2GHz Sempron, but changing from a browser window back to Elements takes ages, not to mention the jiggling when moving window inside Elements.
- Any way to record multiple actions and then "playback" the same actions to multiple other images? This is available in Photoshop, but I can't find a way to do this in Elements..

[Wendy]

Hi ...

... and welcome to the forum :)

It shouldn't be too long before a demo version of PSE5 is available so it may be worth waiting and then try it out.

PSE5 is of a similar size to PSE4 and probably runs at about the same speed. One thing is that you may be using the Organiser as a filebrowser and that is slower ... (CS2 of course simply has Bridge instead of Organiser). Looking at your spec it shouldn't be that slow ... maybe its just rebuilding the thumbs. If so then it should be quicker once that is done. Try it from the Editor using File>Open and what happens then.

Elements doesn't have the capabilities of recording actions althought it does have a limited ability to play them .. so there is the possibility of recording the actions in CS2 and then using them in Elements ... but it all depends what things you actually want it to do.

Wendy