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Last post Author Topic: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??  (Read 48892 times)

moerl

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Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« on: March 22, 2006, 06:18 PM »
OMG.. the new forum KICKS ASS and is soooooo beautiful :). Sweet. Anyway.. the one tool that's not at all in the review is what I'm currently using. What I need with images is mainly an ORGANIZER, and an efficient, fast and good one at that. I'm at a loss as to why Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 was reviewed, but not Elements 4.0? I mean Album 2.0 is SO "obsolete"! Elements 4.0 is what Album 2.0 turned into, after going through being Elements 3.0 or even Album 3.0? I'm confused on that one. Anyway.. I need to check out the new ACDSee Pro review. Generally, how are ACDSee's management capabilities? I don't really care for the editing so much. There a plenty of other programs that I can edit images with. The excellent and free Paint.NET for example.

Anyone?

Carol Haynes

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #1 on: March 23, 2006, 04:16 AM »
I think the confusion arises from the fact that PhotoShop Elements didn't start out as an organiser. It is also relatively expensive (although probably worth it if you edit digital photos in particular). Adobe seem to be going out of their way to combine as many functions as possible into every package they produce. A good example is in the full version pro products come with Adobe Bridge which is really a jack of all trades and pulls together all the Adobe Pro apps into a common interface. Lots of people really like it, but it is yet another application to learn - there are whole books just on Bridge !!! I agree with you about Album though - I bought a copy of it but never really used it as it was incredibly unstable (I don't think I ever used it for more than about 30 minutes without it crashing).

I used to use ACDSee (umpteen versions) but don't any more as I found their support for Canon RAW files abysmal - check out FastStone - seems to do most things ACDSee does, is more stable in my experience and is totally free!
« Last Edit: March 23, 2006, 04:19 AM by Carol Haynes »

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #2 on: March 23, 2006, 07:11 AM »
which canon camera are you using, Carol?

i've not encountered any problems but it may be that i've just not spent as many hours with it as you have.

one thing is definite: acdsee used to be a bit 'crashy' on my old system (amd xp2200, 1.5 gig ram) but i can't remember it crashing on my current system (amd xp 4800x2, 2 gig ram).

Carol Haynes

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #3 on: March 23, 2006, 12:19 PM »
Canon EOS 300D (the US called it the EOS Rebel).

The RAW colours were truly awful - and I was using their 'pro' colour management addin. I emailed support and they said wait for the next version. Given that I had just paid for an upgrade precisely for that feature I was not at all impressed (esp. as it was going to be a long time for the next version). Faststone does the job just better and is free - and now I can use Adobe Bridge too!

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #4 on: March 23, 2006, 12:40 PM »
oh dear. doesn't sound good.

i've not used that camera with it. 10 and 20d have been fine.

vegas

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #5 on: March 24, 2006, 11:14 AM »
So what about Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0  Is anyone using it?  What do they like about it over previous versions and what is cool?

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #6 on: March 28, 2006, 11:53 AM »
APE 4.0 has an excellent organization tool. I personally don't much care for the rest of what it offers, but I have not used it much yet. I have never found a better way to organize photos than with APE 4.0. ACDSee Pro simply seems overkill, and it comes with many features I would never use. I don't need RAW support of any kind, (I have a Canon A620), AFAIK, and I don't need a mere viewer. I do use FastStone as my standard viewer and I love it, but it's not image ORGANIZER. Picasa sucks for organizing the way I see it, and the one thing I have not tried yet is Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 or whatever it's called. It's gotten great reviews from some places.

I don't know how well ACDSee handles specifically the MANAGEMENT/ORGANIZATION part of photo libraries. I know it's good with certain advanced features, but how good is it with organization?

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #7 on: March 28, 2006, 12:42 PM »
might be just what you are used to. photoshop elements doesn't really do it for me but then i've grown up on acdsee so maybe i'm biased. organisation wise, that's what acdsee is all about - isn't it?

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #8 on: March 28, 2006, 01:35 PM »
I didn't know whether ACDSee is primarily for organization or "merely" viewing/browsing/editing images. Guess I'll have to give it a shot.

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #9 on: March 28, 2006, 02:17 PM »
well, i guess it's just down to how you organise things. if you are happy to organise images into folder hierarchies manually then acdsee will then let you 'work' upon those files. view, include, exclude images by all of the common sort of attributes and then take it up a level by viewing groups of disjoint files across many different location using 'notes', metadata, tags, time intervals, etc.

maybe this means it's still primarily a 'browser'. it's down to the user to delve a bit deeper and start organising - i suppose the batch functions could be used too, i keep forgetting they are there.

when i get the time i'll try to do a comparison between acdsee pro and adobe bridge - maybe lightroom too - not promising anything, though.

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #10 on: March 28, 2006, 03:49 PM »
Sounds good, but that's exactly what I meant. Personally I detest folder-based organizational structures. That's why I love GMail's labels. Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 makes it very easy to organize your entire collection of photos completely independently of folders. It imports the images into its own database file, (not sure if it copies the actual images or if it just creates references.. I'm guessing the latter would make more sense and would be more efficient), and then lets you organize ALL of them from one place. That's what I love about it. Now, what do you have to say about ACDSee's handling of this "problem"? Can what I just described be done in ACDSee?

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #11 on: March 28, 2006, 04:27 PM »
your description of photoshop elements sounds like what picassa 2 does to me and yet you don't like that. i must have missed something in elements that was nicer than picassa.

if you wished, you could add any number of notes or labels to images in acdsee and then view things accordingly - regardless of the folder structure.

as has been discussed elsewhere on this forum, 'notes' and 'labels' are super powerful ways of organising files/information. the only bad thing is that perhaps a lot of us haven't realised just how useful this method is of managing our collections. i certainly keep forgetting to organise my images using labels and notes and yet i know that in the long run it would be a great time saver.

back to your question of can acdsee do something similar to what you use photoshop elements for - yes, it can, but you probably aren't going to gain anything by switching to it if you are happy with your current method.
« Last Edit: March 28, 2006, 04:32 PM by nudone »

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #12 on: March 28, 2006, 04:46 PM »
Well if ACDSee can do what APE 4.0 can do, I think a switch to ACDSee would be justified, simply because ACDSee, though it may not have as sexy an interface as APE's, is packed with far more useful features than is APE. The APE organizer is more or less bare. It does come with a good feature-set, but it's not all TOO special. I've never much used its editor but I assume it's fairly powerful. ACDSee probably has many more useful features than APE offers. I'll have to see. I wonder just how well ACDSee can "replicate" the excellent organizer in APE :)

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #13 on: March 29, 2006, 01:35 AM »
can you give me and idea of what you typically do with photoshop elements, i.e. do you transfer your photos from camera to hard drive then pick out certain ones and give them a specific tag, then tag some others, and then a few more, etc. until you have tagged every image.

or do you tag a few and then organise the rest by their date or some other attribute.

i'm curious as to your none folder specific method.

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #14 on: March 29, 2006, 06:23 PM »
You gotta be kidding... a Google AdSense posterbot? Wow. lol!

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #15 on: April 03, 2006, 11:34 PM »
can you give me and idea of what you typically do with photoshop elements, i.e. do you transfer your photos from camera to hard drive then pick out certain ones and give them a specific tag, then tag some others, and then a few more, etc. until you have tagged every image.

or do you tag a few and then organise the rest by their date or some other attribute.

i'm curious as to your none folder specific method.
As a first action, I try to tag ALL images so I have them all organized. So..

1. I add all images I have to the catalogue. As a result ALL images are browsable from inside the application because they are in APE's catalogue.
2. I then start tagging. I create relevant tags as I go.. places, people, and make subdivisions of tags, like "family" and "friends" for people, for example.
3. I have views for tagged and untagged as I go, to easily be remember to keep up with what I've already tagged and with what has not yet been tagged.

That's how it works for me. What I find annoying about ACDSee is that even though I've added all images to its catalogue, I see no way to browse them without still depending on the actual folders the images are in. I've been looking for a BROWSE CATALOGUE option everywhere but could not find it. So even though ACDSee has catalogued all the images I have in my collection, it still depends on folders for browsing? That sucks. That's where, IMHO, APE has it beat completely. And this is a huge and important difference :(

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #16 on: April 03, 2006, 11:46 PM »
Shit! Nevermind.. THE IMAGE WELL is what I was looking for, and ACDSee totally has it! Sweetness. Finally. Aaaaaaaaah great. Truly great! Still.. I like how APE has "image stacking" and also calls sub-items of tag categories image TAGS and not actually CATEGORIES. I mean.. under PEOPLE I usually put people's names, so it's awkward ACDSee calls the names CATEGORIES as well, when really they're just tags. APE makes more sense in that respect. But APE does not have a duplicate image finder tool built-in, nor are its editing features as good as ACDSee's I suppose. Then again I shouldn't be saying that because I've just about never used either one's image editing features. I just imagine ACDSee's are better. Whatever. God damn. Now to REtag my entire image collection. Shit.

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #17 on: April 04, 2006, 01:41 AM »
In ACDSee, is there an easy way to REMOVE images from the catalogue? ACDSee picked up all kinds of files I really don't want in my image catalogue. Example in the screenshot. All the Skype files and the ones with no real thumbnails should be dropped from the database.

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #18 on: April 04, 2006, 02:38 AM »
thanks for the explanation. it's very interesting to hear the comparison between acdsee and photoshop elements. when i've got a moment i'll try and see if there is a method of using acdsee that is more akin to what you are used to.

i'm just looking at this quickly but i'll look closer if you need the help.

it seems you've got 'show all files' enabled under the 'filters' setting. if you disable that i think you'll get rid of a lot of the thumbs. if that doesn't work then it looks like a weird problem.

there doesn't appear to be a way of quickly excluding specific files from the database. you can exclude entire folders but i doubt that is what you want to hear. would creating an 'exclude' tag work?

just a quick edit: with the 'exclude' tag, you'd still have to use a folder method i think, i.e. everything that's in the excluded category would have to be in a particular folder(s) - not really what you are after i admit.
« Last Edit: April 04, 2006, 04:57 AM by nudone »

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #19 on: April 04, 2006, 05:50 AM »
or you could use the 'hidden' attribute which can be turned on and off quite quickly inside acdsee - not very good for how you'll have to view files throughout the rest of your operating system.

i was trying to figure out a way to do more selective searching/viewing using '-' to in quick search to exclude categories but it doesn't really do the job of what you want. you could try this as it half helps...

create 'keywords' tags: 'exclude' and 'include'

assign 'include' to ALL your images and then also assign 'exclude' to the files you want to keep out of the viewing panel. if you then 'quick search' using: include -exclude

you'll see all images bar those with the 'exclude' tag.

david.intp

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #20 on: April 04, 2006, 08:53 AM »
I prefer another product not included in the Image Manager Shootout.  IMatch 3, available at www.photools.com, is very powerful and reasonably priced.

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #21 on: April 04, 2006, 09:26 AM »
iMatch looks quite nice. it would be candidate to include in the next image management shootout but that's not planned any time soon.

i'll give imatch a few days test drive and see if i'm inspired to write more. thanks for pointing it out, david.intp.

moerl

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #22 on: April 04, 2006, 11:23 AM »
I've known about iMatch for years, it seems. I just dumped it as a possible option because I believe it used to be rather expensive for one.. and secondly its target audience used to be much less the broad range of photographers of all sorts of skill levels that it is today... they used to target photo pro's and advanced amateurs and companies specifically. Now it seems they've changed the philosophy around a bit and are offering a much more accessible tool for just about anybody interested in digital photo management. I do remember loving it when I tried it, but couldn't justify the price at the time. I'm willing to say that iMatch may be good enough to blow both APE and ACDSee out of the water in terms of image management capability. The reason I say this is because iMatch has been focused on image management specifically, for YEARS. ACDSee has always been more of an all-in-one type deal, with image browsing, editing and some organizing thrown in for good measure, and Photoshop Album is for noobs, more or less. Not only that, but it ALSO is more of an all-in-one type application, except that the organization component is very strong and everything else is not all that great from what I could tell. I also remember reading extremely good reviews of iMatch back at the time when I tried it.

Do post impressions of iMatch if you try it. I'd be HIGHLY interested. I may try it out myself if I get to it this week.

EDIT:
Overall, I must say I like APE's way of dealing with image management more than ACDSee overall so far. It's much more intuitive and I never had any trouble finding all my catalogued images in APE while with ACDSee, I had to post about the problem before I figured out the image well was what I was looking for.. also, in APE any image can easily be excluded from the catalogue by simply selecting it and hitting the delete key on your keyboard, or via right-click context menu, and leaving the "Delete file from disk as well as from catalogue" (or similar) option UNCHECKED in the delete dialogue that pops up. It's that simple! And in ACDSee I'm supposed to deal with filters and be limited to only being able to exclude whole folders from the image catalogue? Also, APE's interface is far prettier to look at and has some very sexy features ACDSee can not call its own. One of those is image stacking. In APE, you can stack images that are very similar, (like burst-shot images for example, or other very similar images), on top of each other, which is represented in APE by a thumbnail that has visible layers below it to signify a stacked little collection. The top image will have a showing thumbnail, the ones below will not be visible, but the stack can quickly be stacked and unstacked via the context menu. Another sweet thing about APE is how it deals with categories/tags. You can create multiple categories and then you have the option to either create a SUBCATEGORY or a TAG in an existing category. It makes far more sense than ACDSee's universal naming of tags as "categories". As I said before in this thread, you don't want to call a person, for example, a category. Rather, you want to have that be a tag, which is much more intuitive and logical than ACDSee's way of handling this problem. Also, each tag, after having been assigned to at least one photo, in APE, actually gets its OWN THUMBNAIL. Now THAT is cool. On the right in the organization panel, when you are looking at tags, you will actually see small thumbnails ON each tag, the source images for which seem to be selected more or less randomly. I suppose the tag just gets thumbnailed with the FIRST image that was tagged with that tag.

Little things like that are what make me think APE better than ACDSee at this point.
« Last Edit: April 04, 2006, 11:33 AM by moerl »

nudone

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #23 on: April 04, 2006, 11:38 AM »
i've already uninstalled it. i haven't the patience to figure it out at the moment, which isn't really fair on the software but i just couldn't use it straight after install so it had to go.

if a review of pro graphics file managers comes around then imatch will definitely be part of the shootout.

Carol Haynes

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Re: Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??
« Reply #24 on: April 04, 2006, 12:22 PM »
One thing I will say for iMatch is that the author is quick to respond to questions by email. I tried it a while back but somehow never felt comfortable with it and so didn't feel I could justify the price. If a discount could be negotiated I might give it another look. I had problems getting the software to read EXIF information in my digital photos (other software didn't seem to have any problem).