Microsoft have stopped making my favourite image manipulation tool. The 2006 version of Digital Image Suite was the last, which is rather sad as I always quite liked the program. Unfortunately, the code is showing its age a bit now, and it doesn't handle raw camera images very well, and so I've had to look around for a new image processing program. Paint .NET is great for a freebie, but doesn't do much with raw images and I also wanted some image cataloguing tools.
So last week I downloaded a 30 day evaluation copy of Photoshop Elements from Adobe, and this week I bought a book which tells me how to use the program (essential in this case because even a seasoned computer user like me finds some of the ways the program works to be quite opaque). Next week (or perhaps the week after) I might even buy the software itself.
I've always had a kind of "dis-affection" for Adobe software. It never seems to quite work properly for me. Their PDF reader is a huge, unwieldy beast for something which is essentially a file viewer, and it really upsets me when such a lowly program insists on rebooting my machine when it has updated itself.
It used to annoy me even more when it hid the update confirmation window behind everything else, and brought my machine to a standstill waiting for a response.
Having said that, the latest reader does have some rather nice tools that you can use to annotate PDFs which are rather cute, although I guess they contribute to the "bloatiness" of the program and make it much slower to load when all I want to do is look at a document.
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