I didn't see too many differences between the two programs for an amateur until a guy recently told me that Elements cannot use the all important clone tool on 16 bit images. You must first convert to 8 bits, and lose a bunch of data in the process. Let's say you've got this great picture that you shot RAW, or a negative that you scanned as a big tiff file and the picture has a little problem like dust on your sensor or on the scan that must be fixed. He said that In Elements you can only fix this by first converting to 8 bit. Doing this you will lose detail in shadow and highlight areas. He said that he didn't really fully realize this until he starting scanning b+w negs and noticed a big difference in shadow detail of images he had converted to 8 bit in order clone out a few dust spots. Was he doing something wrong to get that reduction of quality or do you believe his explanation to be true?
