What are the differences between Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 or 8 and Adobe Photoshop CS4?

Asked by nashish (196

) December 28th, 2009

I purchased a Wacom Intuos4 tablet today and found that with my purchase I have access to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and two other softwares. I already have Photoshop CS4 myself and wish to pass on Photoshop Elements to a loved one.

After making this decision, I have come to wonder just what the differences are between the “CS4” version of Photoshop and the “Elements” version. The person I am passing this software to will no doubt want to do photo manipulation and I would hate for Elements to hinder them.

In the end, it would still be free software, no matter the capabilities, and you cannot argue with that, but I am still curious about the differences are.

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1 Answer

I think it’s one of those situations where if you have to ask, you won’t know the difference.

I use Photoshop Elements 7 for light-duty web work. And I play in Photoshop contests like this (the first image is the original, the rest are entries).

Only two limitations bother me – the text-on-a-curve tools are weak, and I can’t punch in numbers to scale an image, I have to drag it and watch the numbers in the ‘Info’ window.

For $500 I can work around this. If I needed more, and did not have the budget for CS4, I would switch to the free, open-source The Gimp

jaytkay (25810

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