As you know, I spent the last weekend in the mountains. I had a rather unpleasant incident with my camera’s lens cap which luckily ended well and I eventually came home with over 300 pictures.
I’m trying to improve my photography skills and Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography Book is a great help. I followed most of his suggestions while taking the shots and I’m planning to process the images this weekend.
I was using Paint .Net up until now which is not so bad but not the best either. Its auto correct and sharpening feature is the worst I’ve ever seen. So obviously I wanted to step up one level.
Both Scott and Rick Sammon mention Photoshop Elements in their books as being the proper tool to optimize pictures. At least for semi-pro hobby photographers. The pros use the complete Photoshop but that is way out of my budget so it’s not an option.
Anyhow the first thing I did after returning from this weekend trip was to order the Photoshop Elements 9. I had a huge luck because that was the last day of a special offer from Adobe which actually gave a 40% discount.
I placed the order with some difficulties. The Adobe site is slow and pretty buggy. I had to try several times till I succeeded. Nevertheless I was glad in the end to see that the expected date of arrival was 1st of December so I had to wait only two days for it.
As I opened my order history the next day, my order’s status was still Pending. The next-next day too, which was already 1st of December, the supposed arrival date. I got a little bit worried and angry at myself at that point, especially because Amazon offered the same product on Black Friday, which was exactly on the day I ordered from Adobe, for the same price. I never had shipping problems with Amazon so I trusted them a little more than Adobe.
I already gave up hope that I will even receive it before the weekend starts so my initial plan was ruined. But to my surprise I got a notification in the afternoon of the promised day that my package has arrived. I immediately picked it up but I only had time yesterday evening to install it finally.
I tested it shortly with a couple of the images I took on my trip and I was astonished how amazing this tool is. It works quite slow but the end result is fantastic. No wonder Adobe and Photoshop is recognized as the best in this field. It’s in incredibly huge difference to the other applications I used so far.
Unfortunately I forgot on the first day of my trip to save the RAW images as well and I’m so sorry for that. I realize now that it’s so much better to work with those rather than the usual JPEGs taken by the camera. I will remember not to make the same mistake next time. But until then I can’t wait to play around with PSE this weekend.
FitGeekGirl 