[willdoak]

For just a few more days (I think), Adobe is offering to "up-sell" Photoshop Elements users Photoshop CS3 for $299. (The usual up-sell price is about $150 more than that.) If you're interested and didn't get an email about it, just call Adobe sales.

I wonder if this has happened before, and whether it's to seed prospects for an upcoming release of Photoshop, or whether the introduction of AIR has anything to do with it.

Will Elements and CS3 coexist on a single PC? Or is it one or the other?

Will

[Richard_Lynch]

Adobe is constantly 'seeding', known to them as 'marketing'. You can run Elements and Photoshop on the same machine quite happily. I do it all the time.

This 'special offer' happens all the time, it seems.

But my question: what is it that you don't have in Elements that Photoshop will provide? There are only a few good answers.

[willdoak]

Ultimately, especially as a hobbyist, I agree that I should be satisfied with Elements.

In fact, the only thing I think I’d like better is the color balance (adjustment?) dialog. I ran across that in your layers book, and it looks easier to use than the color correction power tool.

Unless I'm missing something, it seems like the tool requires balancing cyan and red, green and magenta, and blue and yellow -- one at a time. I can't anticipate the affect of those independently, so I just expand the dynamic range and accept the various balances. I tried to use the power tool to balance the colors in "vanishing point" and couldn't get good results. Am I misunderstanding that tool?

And is one feature worth $300? Certainly not for my causal use. Curves? I think your work-around for that in Elements 4.0 is fine and probably gives me better results than my fiddling with curves. Support for printing images? I'm not going to need that.

The only other thing I can put force in my defense (smile) is the great number of books and courses that deal with Photoshop, as opposed to Elements. (The company I work for develops MicroStation, a CAD program. MicroStation rarely gets any shelf space among the hundreds of AutoCAD books.) I like your approach, and I think your explanation of Elements probably nicely carries over to Photoshop.

Along those lines, who (else) do you recommend as good writers on Photoshop?

I certainly wasn't considering buying for Photoshop CS3 for $650. I could say I haven’t upgraded Elements with every release (I’ve lagged behind and benefited from “trailing edge” prices), but that would be a pure rationalization. Perhaps the appeal of a discount got me. A sucker for marketing (my own field, ironically).

Cheers,

Will

[willdoak]

Well, I must say I'm enjoying studying CS3, even though I have yet to accomplish anything with it. ;-)

Will

[willdoak]

As I speculated above. However, if they plan to upsell to Elements users, I don't think I'll fool with it.

From the Wall Street Journal (AP)

The maker of the popular photo-editing software Photoshop on Thursday launched a basic version available for free online.

Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. And, once they register, users can get to their accounts from different computers.

Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that's in the works.

Ron Glaz, a research analyst at IDC, says the move was necessary for Adobe to keep pace. Users are less likely to switch to a software they aren't familiar with, he said.

"They have a whole market that they are missing out on, and they need to make sure that the market is aware there is a Photoshop solution for them. As that market grows and becomes more sophisticated, hopefully it will generate money," Mr. Glaz said.

"It's one of those things, if you can't beat them, join them," Mr. Glaz said. "If they don't join them, the long run could be really painful."