Adobe Photoshop Elements
Adobe® Photoshop® Elements is not a cut-down version of Adobe Photoshop but a powerful image editor in its own right. A few years ago the developers decided to make it distinctive from the main program, both in its selection of facilities and its interface. It is aimed at the "casual photographer," by which Adobe means the person who takes occasional pictures rather than one who takes them without care. You can get fully professional results from Elements, using Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) -- which comes with it -- to develop your RAW files, then going on to process them further in Elements itself, with its resizing, sharpening, denoising and retouching capabilities.
Elements has a substantial feature set including quick-fix adjustment of color, contrast, and lighting, auto red-eye removal and skintone enhancement, correction for camera lens distortions, fine-tuning of exposure, retouching with healing brushes, and shadow and highlight recovery. Just as in the main program you can work on specific parts of the image, using dodge, burn, and sponge tools. 16-bits per channel support produces high quality editing. You also get export to Adobe's universal DNG format for long-term archiving.
The special effects in Elements range from painting simulation to surreal twisting, warping, and stretching of the image. There is black-and-white conversion, sepia toning, and the option to add depth with drop shadows, bevels, glows, and other effects. It lets you create composite images, erase backgrounds, assemble panoramas, add text and graphics, shapes and decorative edges. The program includes 100 different styles of frame, and plenty of scrapbook page layouts for the avid scrapbooker. Basic slide show creation is provided, with the option to add music and narration.
Output is one of Elements' great strengths, with sharing facilities, upload-to-the-web directly from the application, print ordering, creation of greeting cards and albums, and hardbound photo book creation with delivery to the door. There are one or two unusual options like creating real, customized U.S. postage stamps and the ability to create maps which show automatically whereabouts in the U.S. you have taken your images. You can display the pictures on TV, mobile phone or another handheld device, or email them directly to friends.
Elements provides good downloading and organizing facilities, with fast scrolling even when you have accumulated more than 50,000 images. It can stack similar photos on top of each other to save space, allowing you to sort, compare and select images for printing. There is even an integrated online backup service provided by a company that specializes in document security.
Comment
You get a satisfying sense of security in using a program developed by the market leader -- and everything about Elements is polished and reliable. Of course it lacks the power of Photoshop itself, but it has the essential tools, especially the resizing, healing and file conversion tools.
One effective strategy in building an arsenal of photo software is to use Elements as a plugin platform, adding best-of-breed plugins for color manipulation, denoising, sharpening, and the like. You can end up with a superb editing suite with features unavailable even in Photoshop. Alternatively, you can alternate between using Elements as your editor, while relying on a fast, lightweight image browser (like FastStone Maxview) for quick and easy reference to your image library.
Tech info
- OS: Windows XP onwards; Mac OS X
- Price level: Approx. $80
Adobe Systems
Among other activities, Adobe Systems has long been the dominant supplier of image manipulation software. It provides business, creative, and mobile software solutions for all users of digital communications.
From the same vendor:
- Dreamweaver®
- Illustrator®
- InDesign®
- Lightroom®
- Photoshop®
- Premiere®
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