Photoshop Elements 2

Please excuse my novice questions. I have always worked with in-camera negatives and now mostly print exclusively in Pt/Pd. Recently I saw some platinum work done with enlarged digital negatives and was really impressed. Impressed enough to decide to have a look at this type of workflow. At first glance photoshop alone looked pretty overwhelming, so I decided to use what equipment I have and start with the learning curve of photoshop first. My feeble system is a Mac Mini with an additional external hard drive. Photoshop Elements 2 came with the purchase. My sanner is only an Epson 4180. I went and dusted off some old 6x6 negs since the 4180 will scan these 2 1/4 negs ( how well? at this stage that is really not most important). Now Photoshop Elements 2 is probably not going to cut it when the time comes to do some serious scanning. I happened across the book " The Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 2" by Richard Lynch ( also availabe in Photoshop Elements 1,3 and 4) The book explains how PE works and the cd contains a collection of tools that expands what you can do with PE. Calculations...channels....clipping paths....color balance....custom vectors.....curves....masking...color separation ( RGB, CMYK, and Lab) and enhanced sharpening are some of the features. My question is ; Is anyone familiar with this add- on program? If so, could this make a respectable image suited for making a digital negative? Thanks in advanced, Robert

Elements may be sufficient for your needs. In order to make a digital negative, you will need layers, curve adjustments and color adjustments. Basically you will take your scanned negative, turn it into a positive image, perfect your image (burn, dodge, crop, etc.), apply an adjustment curve, turn it back into a negative, add a blocking color and then print it out on a piece of transparent film on your photo printer. If Photoshop elements can do all that, you don't need much else to get started. If you like it, you can upgrade later.

While this sounds direct, you will need some basic training in photoshop. This training can come from a local tech school or community college. Photoshop is very challenging to learn on your own.

RobertP said:

My question is ; Is anyone familiar with this add- on program? If so, could this make a respectable image suited for making a digital negative? Thanks in advanced, Robert

Click to expand...

I've heard of people "upgrading" their Elements this way for the price of a book -- apparently it works. Curves are handy, a better way in the long run than using, say, the transfer function in the print dialogue. Also, Photoshop isn't the only editing application out there in the world that supports curves. Corel, Picture Window Pro et al all have curve functions these days and cost way less.
Your scanner is more than adequate for what you want to do. Unless you want to make a print bigger than 3' by 3' (feet).
Memory on your computer may be an issue. To produce a 16 by 20 digital negative (85MB tiff) you'll want at least 512 MB or your system will be choked as soon as you start adding layers and wanting to do things like "undo". 2GB is ideal. What kind of printer are you intending to use?

The mini has 512MB of memory and I've added 312 GB with an external hard drive for more storage room. As yet I don't have a quality photo printer. I was kind of waiting until the 3800 comes out. Thanks, Robert