Photoshop Elements

Is Photoshop Elements good enough for Astrophotography. Will it work with MaxIm DL and MaxDSLR. It seems to have everything Photoshop CS2 has with the exception of curves and CMYK, at more than half the price. I see alot of Amateur Astronomers using Photoshop, but some of us cannot afford $499.00, for a professional photo editor designed for professional photographers.

Depends on which version you are referring to. I have ver 2.0 and it is an excellent program for general photography. You can sharpen, do levels, limited color variations, etc. It doesn't have tools specific enough to astrophotography to make stacking, etc, easily doable.
There is now a ver 4.0 with a street price of 90.00 or so, and some reviews in photo magazines tout it pretty highly. However, it still lacks the tools that are needed for astrophotography.
If you just want something to polish off what Maxim or IP have created then it will probably suffice.

Walt

Robert
If you will do a search in the forums under Photoshop Elements you will find a thread I started a few months ago.

I am currently using (learning) Photoshop CS2 and find that it is a considerably more powerful tool than Photoshop Elements V3.0. But in my previous use of Photoshop Elements 3.0 I did discover two very powerful tools for astro images. My previous post stated:

These are (in the menu structure):
ENHANCE, ADJUST LIGHTING, (1) SHADOWS/HIGHLIGHTS and (2) LEVELS.
While many of the Photoshop Elements 3.0 features do not work on a 16 bit TIFF file, these two do and to me make it worth the cost. I believe I could eventually get the same results by working within the MaximDL, but not with the ease of the sliders and instant on-screen updates as provided with these features of Photoshop Elements 3.0.

To my knowledge, Photoshop Elements V1.0 and V2.0 only work in 8 bit mode, which will loose a lot of your image data just importing. V3.0 and V4.0 perform with these tools in 16 bit mode (16 bit TIFF files) which is a real advantage. In MaximDL save the image as a 16 bit TIFF file. Bring it up in PS Elements 3.0 or 4.0 perform your adjustments and save as a 16 bit TIFF. Reopen in MaximDL and you can work it as a tif or save back to a FITS file. I could see no loss of bitmap data. Header info may be lost though.

In PS Elements, for tools that only work in 8 bit mode, save these for your final tweeks before printing or saving as a JPEG for posting.

In my opinion, Photoshop Elements 3.0 or 4.0 is a very valuable tool for astro images, and the nice thing is that most of your learning curve will carry right into Photoshop CS2+ if, in the future, you should purchase it.

I hope this helps.
Thanks
Steven Jindra

Thanks to all for the info.