I'm using DPP for RAW and Faststone for importing and file management. A very similar apporach to Chris's except for PC rather than Mac. I still use PS7 for a few tweaks plus a noise reduction program occasionally.

Photoshop CS2, Elements 5 and Silkypix Studio3 Raw developer and ACDSee Photo Pro for file management.

Adobe Lightroom for RAW and all colour adjustment including Greyscale. Elements 5 for everything else. I gave up on PSP 10 due to lack of RAW support for Olympus. Raw Shooter was very good for raw but lack of jpg or tiff compatibility was a big drawback.:)

I have been very impressed with the final version 1.0. What do you think?

Do you (or anyone else) know the relationship between CS2 and Elements 4&5? ie is Elements 5 a slimmed down version of CS2 whereas Elements 4 is a slimmed version of PS8...and for that matter is CS2 a complete re-write and/or how different from a development of PS8.

As I still occasionally have to resort to Elements 4, which is evidently in deperate need of a re-write, is 5 worth considering given that I am not going to pay CS2 sort of money

It is good and for once I am not stuggling to remember how to do things. Still waiting for the Raw Shooter update tool so I can upload the raw files that have already been tweaked.
Chris

I believe Elements 5 is based on Photoshop 7, I remember reading it somewhere when Elements 5 first came out!!

nirofo.

Elements 5 is based on CS2 ,each upgrade of Elements usally has a few extra features added to it from the currant Photoshop version and some CS does not have.

Elements 5 has had added to it the sharpen filter which is the same tool that is called "smart sharpen" in CS2, it has also had a curves tool and a b&w conversion tool added that is based on the channel mixer. These are the main additions to the editor over 4 , in my opinion it is good upgrade from 3 but not so much from 4, saying that as a Adobe Beta tester I always have the latest ;)

By the way the same engine runs Elements and CS its just that access to some of the features are engineered out, if as nitro wrongly sugggests it is based on PS7 then it would not have all the features that are missing from PS7 like the healing brush, spot healing brush, shadow & highlight tool and smart sharpen. It would also be capable of 16 bit editing in adjustment layers if Adobe enabled it in the software, but then who would buy CS2 and also they have to have something to offer further down the line :)

I am currently using Photoshop CS 2 and Nikon Capture 4. I tried NX but wasn't convinced that shelling out more money was worth it.

Thank you Paul. It seems to me that it is the constant addition to PS that has become its weakness, not that it doesn't have the features, just that it makes it slow and memory+battery hungry. (and from a macuser's view, nowhere near enough key-board short-cuts) Hence my hope that a compete re-start might be on the horizon. Huh.