Photoshop Elements 2

[Michael Heald]

Hello! I use Elements 2 with Hidden Power. It is fairly easy to use and the Hidden Power Book is pretty straight forward.
I tried Light Zone 1.5, and I nearly bought it, but two things kept me - the clone tool was difficult to use in order to spot my 4x5 B&W negatives and and I couldn't invert from positive to negatives and back again. The second wasn't a big deal. The first was, since I had to import the images into Elements 2 to spot them anyway.
One advantage is that Light Zone works in 16 bit as opposed to 8 bit for Elements.
I've been using Silverfast to scan with my 4990. I can do a lot of 16 bit work in the scanner, and for negatives that are reasonably well exposed, the amount of editing I need to do is much reduced.
I was disappointed with the $249 price of Light Zone 2.0. I'll download it and see how it works. Shooting/scanning B&W means that I have much less need for layers, editing, etc. than I would for color, so I'm not sure the extra price will be worth switching to Light Zone, but I'll give it a try and see. I really like the interface. It is a lot more user friendly than Elements. Best regards.

Mike

[robert]

Michael, I was hoping Lightzone would be a good program for enlarged digital negatives. But if you can't invert the image then it doesn't sounds as promising.

[Michael Heald]

Hello! Light Zome 2.0 might allow you to invert the images. The earlier versions didn't. I haven't donwloaded 2.0 to check. Best regards.

Mike

[Ted Harris]

A quick look at LZ 2 doesn't show any obvious way to invert an image. OTOHG, you can easily save as a TIFF file and do the inversion in PS Elements.