Difference between Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve really been wanting to get Adobe Photoshop, but it’s very expensive. I like to do photo manipulation, but I’m by no means a professional, it’s just a little hobby on the side.

Can anyone tell me what the full version of Adobe Photoshop has that Photoshop Elements does not? To the people that have used both - do you think it’s worth the price to buy the full version, or is Photoshop Elements enough of a program for all but the most serious photo enthusiasts?

I have looked on Ebay, and the newest version of Photoshop is still rather expensive. I’ve also looked at older versions that are relatively cheap, but if I won’t even use half of the things it offers than I might as well just buy Photoshop Elements.

Any suggestions?

2

I recently got Photoshop after using Photoshop Elements for a while. It’s hard for me (as a novice) to describe the differences. Suffice it to say that nearly everything in Photoshop Elements has a million more options and parameters you can fiddle with in the full Photoshop.

For me, Photoshop elements was perfectly fine for pretty much everything I was doing, which really was not much. Buying the full version of Photoshop would not have been worth the price to me for that. However, I am learning to appreciate the full version more since I did buy it. I bought it along with the whole CS2 package for some school needs because it was available for a much, much lower price through the university.

3

IMHO. Elements is appropriate for for most needs.

4

Photoshop contains many advanced color management features that are really only useful to printers and to professional graphic designers. A big example is that PS Elements doesn’t support CMYK images. A hobbyist working at home, putting digital photos on the web or printing them on an inkjet printer, doesn’t need CMYK support.

5
      • GIMP-win is free: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
        As far as hand-painting pictures and editing regular photos, it’s all you need. …The big thing (for some people) that it won’t do is use Photoshop plugins and filters.
        ~
6

Thanks for the replies, everyone! It seems like Photoshop Elements is the way to go (for me, anyhow).

And DougC, I have used GIMP in the past. I’ve heard that it can do everything that Photoshop can do, but it was hard for me to work with because I had never used it before, and I’m just used to Photoshop.

7

Having seen my father spend hours refining his travel photos with Photoshop Elements, I would say it’s fine for anyone who is using it for hobby purposes. You can refine color, contrast, position, along quite a continuum. You can clone areas to eliminate features you don’t want in the shot. You can save images in different formats and complexities.

8

In the same price range you might also consider Paint Shop Pro.

I’ve never used it myself, but i know plenty of digital camera users who say that it does everything they need and more.

This product used to be produced by JASC, but it looks like they might have been bought out by the Corel company.

9

I used to have Photoshop Elements, but it was lost when we got a new hard drive in out computer. I can’t find the software to re-install it, so I have actually used it quite a bit, but was unsure (since I was going to have to buy another version anyhow) if I should just suck it up and get the full version.

And mhendo, my boyfriend has Paint Shop Pro on his computer and I have tried to use it before but, like GIMP, I’m just not familiar with it’s interface and therefore I find it harder to use. What can I say, I’m a creature of habit.