Description:
By merging Photoshop sophistication with tutorials and newbie helpers--and offering it at a pocketbook-friendly price--Adobe has created a cool tool for digital shutterbugs. Based on Photoshop 6.0, Photoshop Elements trims the most advanced features from Photoshop and replaces them with buckets of user-friendliness. The interface, which will feel immediately comfortable to Mac users, is full of hints and helpers. By default, the workspace contains a dynamic hints window that displays nuggets of data and links to more detailed help for each tool your mouse cursor passes over. Tabs displayed above the workspace function similarly to pull-down menus: clicking on one opens a window which covers functions such as file browsing, displaying image revision history, applying effects and filters, and so on. Some even act like Windows-style wizard tutorials. The most wizard-like among these is the Recipes window, which walks users through the software's hundred or so image editing options with step-by-step instructions. Recipes included with the program deal with the most pedestrian of tasks like color correction and image rotating, all the way up to daring endeavors like colorizing black-and-white photos and creating animated GIF files. More recipes are available via download. Behind all of these simplicity-centric goodies is a powerful and feature-rich image editing program, and it's crammed with every bit of functionality we've come to expect from Adobe. Ready to deal with every image file format one would likely encounter, its layer management is topnotch (even compared to Paint Shop Pro 7). Photoshop Elements is also able to pare image file sizes down and prep them for immediate Web posting, and its real-time, text-on-image editing is second to none. Granted, the application lacks some of Photoshop's functionality, such as the ability to output files in CMYK format, although it is able to read CMYK files. Alternately, some of its unique features will make Photoshop owners jealous--like the incredibly smooth Photomerge, which creates a single panorama out of a series of overlapping photos. If you're looking for a comprehensive, intuitive, and affordable photo editor, Elements proves it can play with the best of them. --Joel Durham, Jr.
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