Mike, I guess I can give you a preliminary report on comparing Elements to Picture Window Pro. I haven't done everything (that I do) yet, but at least for the simple basics they seem to compare quite favorably.
The differences are minor - Cropping is still a minor bit easier with Picture Window but not by much. Elements seems slightly better at resizing down - at least sharpening wasn't as needed after. Obviously the interfaces are different. Can't say one is clearly superior to the other, just different. I suspect that once you get past the simpler things (crop, sizing, sharpening, color correction, cloning, etc) then some more differences might start showing up. If/when I run into them, I'll make more comments. Anyway, Elements is not as bad as I remember once giving it another open minded try. Bruce Monday, January 13, 2003, 3:05:52 PM, you wrote: >> You've gotta change the setting right next to the >> width and height boxes to fixed aspect ratio. Then, >> you can fill in the values. But where do you go from >> there? The image remains unchanged and the subsequent >> crops aren't fixed to that aspect ratio. MJ> Huh? Yes they are. I have Elements v.1.0, and on my program, you click on MJ> the crop tool (third down on the left in the toolbox, the overlapping "L" MJ> brackets) and in the bar at the top, boxes for width, height, and resolution MJ> appear. If you fill in "6" for width and "4" for height, for example, the MJ> crop tool automatically maintains a 4x6 ratio however large or small you MJ> make it and wherever you place it on the image. Furthermore, the next time MJ> you hit the crop tool, the same values will be remembered unless you click MJ> the "clear" command next to them. MJ> You can make the crop box larger, smaller, move it around, or rotate it with MJ> simple mouse clicks. MJ> --Mike