Photoshop Elements or Paintshop Pro X?

Having recently added a DS body to my system I'm currently using a trial version of Photoshop Elements. That seems to work reasonably well with Pentax RAW format files, however I'm not quite so keen on the dumbed down interface that it uses for image manipulation. The full Photoshop is out of my price range so I was considinging Paintshop Pro X as an alternative. Can anyone advice on it's compatability with Pentax RAW and/or offer any advice on which of the two to go for?

Why not see if you can pick up a copy of Photoshop 7 at a reasonable price? I like PS7 a lot, although it doesn't tackle the RAW situation. Maybe you could look at some of the RAW converters and then use PS7 to work on the resulting TIFFs?

Picture Window Pro does most things PS does at a fraction of the price. Not pretty, but not aimed at idiots, either.

Capture One LE is perhaps the best RAW converter. It does everything, and its workflow features are very good indeed.

G

I have tried both - and stuck to PSE.
Personally, I found it much faster at previewing than PSP, and in the end served me well as it provided a solid grounding when I had to move up to PS-CS for work
There's no end of tutorials etc for PSE (and many for PS that work on PSE).
But then, as George says, there's other packages out there too - you just have to try them.

And even if PSE3 or 4 deals with PEF files - get Capture One LE if you're serious

Each to his own

Matt

I gave the trial versions of both a go and decided to buy Elements 4 in the end.

Having tried out many programs I have plumped for Photoshop elements (recently upgraded to v4). For inital conversion from RAW files I use Pixmantec Rawshooter which is much better than the built-in RAW converter in PSE.