We don’t do much photo editing so we gave our Photoshop Elements away some time ago, but we were thinking about buying the new version just so we could use Bokeh. Then we read the reviews at Amazon.com. People are saying that the old version is almost as expensive as the new, signaling high demand for the old.

Newer isn’t always better, and this is true of many programs. One user commented that Photoshop Elements appeared to reach its peak in Version 3. Most user comments say the newer versions are too complicated. A marked complaint was that the later versions display tiny type on a black background. Even people with excellent eyesight complained about straining to read it and urged people not to buy the program until Adobe fixes it. We noticed they haven’t fixed it and it’s been out for 14 months. Why do companies sometimes gunk up a nice program and make it worse in new versions? Why to sell new product, of course.

Meanwhile, back to Bokeh, which lets you do things like focus attention on a person in a photo while blurring the background or simulate fast action without the use of a special lens.  Check out their gallery at Alienskin.com.

Ray Turley, an 82 year-old New Zealand woman, got a new career when she started taking tutorials to learn how to turn photographs into art. Now she sells around twelve canvases a year, she says.

Landscapes are her big sellers. She learned how to use Corel Painter and Photoshop from tutorials on Karen Sperling’s latest DVD, called “Painting for Photographers.” We were impressed by Turley’s art. You can see it at tinyurl.com/artmag1.

You don’t have to know much to follow the DVDs. They go step-by-step. But you will need patience to learn the full bag of tricks. The DVD isn’t cheap at $140, but it’s probably cheaper than tuition for art lessons.

If you use Windows, the most popular font manager is “FontCreator” from High-Logic. Use it to make your own handwriting font or add logos and signatures to an existing font. It’s free to try, $65 to buy.

The new “Inkling” could be a real boon for artists. Draw on ordinary paper and everything you draw is saved in a digital version, thanks to a special wireless drawing tool and a receiver that clips onto your sketchpad.

The Inkling is a $200 gadget from Wacom, the leading drawing tablet company. It costs more than their more common tablets but this thing can capture 1024 variations in pressure, and export your drawings as vectors. Vector drawings are great because they can be scaled to any size without loss of quality. Lots more info at Wacom.com.

ArtRage is a digital paint program for artists and is now out in new $40 and $80 versions for Windows and Mac and a $7 version for the iPad.

The new thing we like best about the computer versions is recording and playback. Ever watch the process as a painting is being created? It’s spell-binding. The new ArtRage lets you record all your strokes and then play them back for an audience, either at the original speed, or speeded up. You can turn it into a tutorial by adding voice-overs and speech bubbles.

If you have trouble making smooth strokes, the new “loaded palette knife” lets you load the paint on before using it, so all the strokes are smooth. There are a lot of other improvements in pencils, crayons and chalks, too many to list. If you do a web search on ArtRage, you’ll find lots of galleries and user groups.