Photoshop Elements??

Has anyone had any experience with Adobe Photoshop Elements? Does it have enough features to make it useful for astro image editing? If not, what is it missing?

I'm new to this CCD imaging game - just managed to take my first picture of Saturn with a Philips Vesta webcam last night. I'd like to play about with processing the images, but I don't want to spend $600 on Photoshop to do it :-)

thanks,

Steve

I just bought v2.0 and I don't believe it will do what some of the astro dedicated programs do, or at least not as easily. It's ok for contrast and color control and sharpening/unsharp masking, but I don't know how readily it will handle layers and stacking. I'm relatively new to some of this digital stuff, however, so others with more knowledge need to jump in here too.

Walt

It's missing a key bit of functionality: Curves. Curves and Levels are the two Photoshop tools you use 90% of the time. Having one missing makes Elements not very useful for astronomical image editing.

Ron Wodaski

Stephen,

Since you are doing webcam photography with a Philips Vesta Pro, Registax is an excellent first step for doing alignment, stacking, and sharpening on planets. Registax is freeware so that will cost you nothing.

You will still need another program or two in order to adjust color balance, saturation, and tweak the sharpness (or add slight blurring to remove graininess imparted by Registax). Adobe Photoshop 5.0LE is often bundled with new hard drives (I got this with a Maxtor hard drive) and will solve color balance and blurring issues. The one problem that Adobe Photoshop 5.0LE cannot due is realign RGB elements. Many webcam imagers run into the problem of obtaining planetary images that have a blue limb. This is apparently caused by the atmosphere (I wonder if the color camera is also partially responsible). A shareware program called "The Gimp" supposedly can split a bmp or jpeg color file into RGB components and then realign; I have not tried this software yet but it sounds like it can do all the other color adjustments too. There are Photoshop clones that cost ~ $100 that should be able to do this but I have not tried these either. AstroArt 2.0 can do RGB realignment and costs $150. I just acquired this but haven't learned how to use the software yet. AstroArt 2.0 does not have a good instruction book but there is an AstroArt Yahoo group where you can get help (if not in this group). K3CCD Tools might be able to do RGB realignment but I don't know for sure (this is a shareware program).

Dave Keller