RAW and Photoshop Elements trouble

Hello. This is my first post and it's a desperate one.

I recently took 150 pictures of a friend's daughter all in RAW. I'm new to RAW and am still working my way through PE5. My friend and her daughter wanted nearly 100 of these pictures. I said, "No problem."

This is how I approached my task at hand:
I selected one RAW image and went to edit it. It goes to the special RAW place where I moved some sliders around and when content saved it as a dng. Then I "opened" it.

Once in the regular editing place, I did a few more things and chose "Save As." I saved it as a high quality 10 and then moved on to photo #2. I spent the whole day in front of my computer and was only half way through!

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way? 150 images in RAW is a nightmare. Please tell me there's an easier way.

PE5 is my only option. It's fairly new and dh would not go for any other new program.

Thanks for helping. I know it's such a beginner question, but that's me - a beginner.

Karen

I think Elements only lets you go one picture at a time... been awhile since I used it, but might check to see if after getting your edit right in RAW, see if you can save your setting and then apply it to others.

With another program (like DPP, which should have came on the CD if your shooting with a Canon camera) you can copy and paste settings, or (I think) even select a group of similar pictures and edits get applied to all of them at the same time.

For example if a particular set of the images were slightly under exposed and WB off, you can apply the same exposure AND wb to a group of images much quicker. If everything looks good in the RAW (you can even crop in DPP), I won't even go into Photoshop... I leave that reserved for the few images that need something more, or that I want to use filters on.

Then at the end you batch output the bunch to jpg or tiff.

(Also, zoombroswer (which comes with canon cameras) also has a RAW converter.) Typically, with Canon's converters (in my experience) you'll spend less time messing with colors getting them to look "right" than you will in Camera RAW. Zoombrowser does the best at getting image to match the out of camera jpeg... DPP gives much better control over the entire image..

I will second the DPP that came with your camera. I too will make adjustments to that and many times (on regular stuff, ie: not wedding images) will not even need to go into Photoshop. It is a very powerful and simple program. Give it a try.