Now that my Adobe Elements 3 package from Amazon has been returned (bad delivery practices), I started looking at alternatives that I had not considered. Two look interesting, one traditional, one less known.

I know a lot of people here use Paint Shop Pro 9. I used PSP way way back before switching to PhotoShop. I downloaded the demo version and have been playing with it.

PSP does convert RAW from my Rebel with limited control over the parameters. The other features appear to be pretty standard and includes the functions I normally use for photographs plus a lot more. Nothing surprising here.

The other product is Picture Window from Digial Color and Light. These are the people who produce the very excellent Color Mechanic.

PW is very different from "normal" imaging programs. It is all based on what photographers need and use. Rather than layers, for example, it creates new images with the old ones being a history of changes. Workflow is different and the interface is much cleaner and, after some practice, somewhat more intuitive for me. It also includes Color Mechanic embedded in the product. It does not handle raw formats and doees have rather anachronistic extra support for Kodak's PhotoCD.

There are reviews for both products with the usual variations. In particular, the reviews of Picture Window are quite a few versions out of date. It is now at version 3.5, the latest review is 2.xx.

Those of you who have used these products, especially "refugees" from Adobe products, any comments on these? Did you try one and switch back to PhotoShop? Have you found things that these products don't do for photographs? At this point in time, I am leaning towards Picture Window using my existing BreezeBrowser to play with RAW images. But...

Any info or opinions welcome.