Yes, I often stop down to 1 1/2 stopss too, depending on if I'm seeing a lot of light areas in the image. In fact, I don't have a whole lot of time and a big garden, so I have to be efficient. Not knowing what mood I'll be in re depth of field when I look at them later on, I'll take multiple pictures in multiple f stops and in each of those f stops, I'll usually take multiple bracketed exposures, if I explained that right. It's not unusual for me to take 200-300 pictures on a 30 minutes walk around the garden being really efficient! The problem I'm having now is that my lens is too slow and I'm getting lots of slightly blurred images. I need a faster lens, which is too expensive for the moment. Re the reds, if you use the magnetic lasso in photoshop you can isolate areas that you want to have a separate exposure. Also, there is now very exciting new technology by Nik software where you can just click on any area and change that area. I'll definitely be getting that at some point. In the meantime, if it's really a problem, I'll isolate the part of the image I need to change with the magnetic lasso or just manipulate the exposure with levels, but I don't like super saturated reds, so I'll underexpose the reds by a variety of settings to be sure that there is detail in the bloom later on. Working with the exposure should help with the color. If not, you can always manipulate the individual color tones.

Update: I bought a new cable at Radio Shack. Went to download the driver, found out that NOOOO!!! HP did NOT have the drivers available, for ANY recent Windows systems. Come to find out, the page that was set up with links for downloading the applications was bogus, when you clicked on the link, you got a whole page of information, but bottom line, the drivers weren't available for downloading and hadn't been since 2009. This INFURIATES me!! My Laserject 5L is completely useless now. And no, I don't want to mess around on E-bay trying to find and install this or that for my old laptop. I can't even get the printer to work with the old laptop which has a prong cable connection. The print job goes to the printer, the printer turns on but never prints. Eventually I get an error message. So I don't know what the problem is. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the driver from the computer over and over again, so maybe there is something wrong internally with the printer. My PC guy told me I could get a pretty good laser printer for 100 bucks, and when all's said and done I would probaby have to spend over 100 bucks messing around trying to fix the old system, with possibly no good results anyway, so I'm giving up on my old 5L friend. I am NOT very happy about it!! :(

MS Office '97-'03 should install just fine on Vista. My Office 2000 version did. So, maybe if you have an old version of office, you could install that, then use the XP upgrade Office disk. If PhotoShop 6 will install and is compatible with Vista, then you could install it and use the PhotoShop CS upgrade disk. I guess you'll just have to try and see what happens. Vista will let you know if anything is not compatible during the install.

Gee, I sorry if I was feeling "too good" about my purchase. But, I say if you haven't put your hands on one your experience with his machine is less than mine. At least you have spared me from someone buying one of these because "Jerry said" is worth $400. My reference to that number is what I recall reading in the add, recalling how much these machines costs just a couple of years ago. This machine came without any reference to Windows 8, has the good old fashioned glossy documentation makes me think it was "designed for" sale in a higher priced market.. If one has a home network and want to share a printer, they might be happier (at an additional cost of at least $50) if the printer is accessed off of Ethernet or WiFi. On the W8, I moved forward first on my W8 notebook to access that printer. With the great help from this site I used the information to set the printer as "shared" on the XP host computer. I then followed the directions to use the W8 Control Panel to open the network (hey, this was all looking familiar) and bingo there I found my XP machine and thus the Printer. I doubled clicked the Canon printer and W8 started to look for a driver.... I'll estimate 3 or 4 minutes later I got a failure to find a driver. The next step upon this type failure indicated to try to install the printer in W8 (W7 really specified) and that failed too. I went to the Canon web site and downloaded a driver for W8. Now ready I went back to the W8 Control Panel and opened the network and this time I couldn't find even the XP machine, never mind the printer. It was after 11 PM by that time so I decided to try again in the morning -yet to be accomplished. But, before bed I decided to look at the DVD that came with the printer. it has no indication of what OS systems it supported, but I put it in the W8 and loaded both the driver and the software to operate the scanner (which by the way is a low resolution color scanner.. low resolution for B&W too, not a picture quality scanner which is the case for all home machines I have owned). I'm yet to try again to gain access from the W8 and W7 computers. Now on my second cup of coffee, and will try to access the XP machine when I get energetic enough to go to the other room and turn it on.