I'm very surprised on how many different comments/flames may be generated by a simple question on this list. You, boys and girls, are just absolute crazy... lol! (no offenses intended, uh!) I am a computer literate (if these are the words), and I can understand the Ann's point when she said she's not going to move on Win XP because of old HW and so on... About the notebook, If she's saying she's not going to upgrade to WinXP , she's problably also saying she's not going to upgrade her hardware... Maybe you should find handy one of those portable hard disk that may copy directly from the CF to the HD on the field they are quite cheap (100 euros with HD here in Italy)... You HAVE to shoot RAW, just because they are better... your 1000$ camera is underused otherwise... about PS elements, I find it a crap for the money, and my advice is, as always, use the GIMP, that's - as many of you already know - free software, and with the rawphoto plug-in can open the RAW files directly. I made a shell script (sorry for linux only) that automatically extracts the embedded jpegs from every crw (canon raw) files in the directory, it takes few seconds for 50 images so it's fast... Jpegs are fast browsing previews, then you choose the ones you like and open them with the GIMP. (this is what I do) I'd like to give it to you, but I understand you all use WinDOS or Mac OS X, so it is useless (maybe in the MAC OS X environment it may work, how knows??, do you want to try it?) I also made one other script that extract the EXIF and wirte it into a text file named as the original photo but with a different extension (example gratia: crw_1245.info). They use some external programs for their jobs, of course.
btw, there is also a plug-in - GIMPshop - that changes the menu in the GIMP to a more familiar layout, for whom is used to PS... The GIMP is surely better than PS elements, anyone who has used both should agree with me on it... and it costs nothing... AND you understand the name? "the GIMP" !! it's a warranty itself!! ;) ciao, Danilo
