Burt wrote:
I bought PSE4 and installed it. In addition, I have PSE2 and PSE3. Except for the maddening out of control scrolling that occurs when cropping an image in PSE3 I prefer 3 to 4.
I hadn’t noticed that. I guess I don’t crop much. I do use the free JPEGCrops to choose my crop for 4 x 6, occasionally.
http://ekot.dk/programmer/JPEGCrops/ 4 no longer has the browse screen and it requires that you use PSE4’s cataloging system to store and relocate photos. Having come through from the original DOS days with the first IBM PC’s I am very comfortable storing my files in subdirectories with names meaningful to me.
I guess I never used that, either! I just store my photos in folders by the date I took them off the camera. I browse with Irfanview, and have assigned the <ctrl>+e "edit" combination to PSE3. IrfanView even does thumbnails, and quickly. I have no need for the organizer whatsoever, and I certainly don’t want the Adobe Downloader popping-up when I insert media of any type.
When I started using PSE4 my catalog file became corrupted and I couldn’t access photos easily. At that point I decided to stay with PSE3. The new tricks in the upgrade were not interesting enough to bother with 4 as far as I am concerned. I get everything I need out of 3 and won’t even consider 5.
Ouch. I actually downloaded the PSE5 Tryout over the weekend. 471 MB, holy crap! First of all, it wouldn’t install on Windows 2000. Then it doesn’t like my Athlon XP because it doesn’t have SSE2 instructions. I finally got it installed on another system that I didn’t really want it on after first imaging the drive . It took a long time to install, and this system has a Pentium M at 2.4 GHz, which is pretty fast.
I was intrigued by the Straighten tool, since I seem to take a lot of crooked pictures. It’s fast and it works well. You need to hold down the control key to do vertical. The Magic Extractor tool didn’t work well enough for me to ever want to use it again. Dialog boxes couldn’t deal with my large fonts, which have been around since Windows 95– twelve years. I’m afraid the upgrade just may not be compelling enough.