Adobe-Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom

I thought I would try my hand at software review. I downloaded the trial versions of "Elements" and "Lightroom" to see how they compare to the "Photoshop" type. I am comparing them to the latest CS3 Photoshop as they are, in many ways, interconnected. Elements is probably called "Elements" because it has some elements of the parent Photoshop. All three of these systems perform very well in the fields inwhich they are intended to operate. Elements has some strong editing functionality using most of the tools found in Photoshop. There are obvious differences in both Elements and Lightroom. Elements is designed to handle small (ish) files. It wouldn't touch the panorama that consisted of 15 layers of large digital image files. But then, it was over 100meg. Photoshop takes long enough to load it. The file saving was paerticularly good as it offered a jpeg2000 option. If you don't know anything about jpeg2000 it is worth looking up on the web. There is too much to be said about it here. It's major benefit is that it will compress a file without loss. (you do have the opportunity to reduce file sizes further with a bit of loss but it's still better than the old jpeg standard. I reduced am image from 45,700 to 3900kb in it's lossless mode.
Photoshop CS has the jpeg2000 plugin as an option on the CD in a folder "Goodies", "Optional Plugins", "Photoshop only", "File Formats", "JPEG2000.8BI. Just copy this file and put it in the plugins folder in the Photoshop folder in the Programs directory putting it under "File Formats". You can Comment me if you need any help with this. I will continue this blog later when I will tell you about Lightroom.