AV News 175 - February 2009
All these may be nice facilities to have, but are certainly not essential to the
average (or perhaps even the super advanced) AV enthusiast. Now this
leads me to ask my own question. In these times of depression and hardship,
with the country in recession, and everyone watching their pennies and
tightening their belts, do we as AV enthusiasts actually need to spend large
amounts of money on image editing software? The obvious answer is no we
do not. If we simply cannot mend and make do with what we've got, and
need to purchase new software for compatibility purposes then perhaps we
should consider something other than Photoshop CS4. Adobe also produce
another useful and much underestimated image editing software package
named Photoshop Elements, currently this is at version 7.
This software has an abundance of useful functions and is available at a
more attractive price than current full Photoshop versions, at the time of
writing it is priced at £74.75 inclusive of VAT direct from Adobe. Many of the
tools are very similar to those in full Photoshop versions. Those that are not
instantly recognisable are generally easy to understand, almost self
explanatory and within the drop down menus reside a host of other functions,
filters, effects and tools that you may not expect in what is often mistakenly
thought of as a light-weight image editing package. It's quite noticeable that
in many Audio-Visual sequences we now see movement being introduced
for whatever reason. This requires (in PTE 5.5) .PNG (portable networks
graphic) files with transparent backgrounds. Adobe Photoshop Elements 7
can easily create and handle such files, along with all the usual .jpg .psd .gif
.bmp .eps .raw .tif and a host of others. Furthermore it operates perfectly on
Windows XP 32 bit systems with service packs 2 or 3 installed and also
under Vista.
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