Photoshop Elements Helps Hobbyists Produce Pro-Quality Pics

Ordinary digital photographers like you and me can now take the dodgiest digital picture and fix it up with a few swipes of the mouse – applying an unsharp mask, adding a saturation calibration layer and tweaking the hue and tint.

No idea what I'm talking about? No problem.

The latest version of Adobe's Photoshop Elements – otherwise known as Photoshop "Lite" – makes it possible for amateur shutterbugs to perform even the most complex image manipulations.

Photoshop Elements Version 6, available on Monday for Windows users (with an Apple version due out in early 2008), is a simple but powerful image editing application.

The software greatly borrows and simplifies many features from its big brother, Photoshop. Gone are things like four-color process tools and scripting. Also excised are the complicated floating palettes and custom workspaces -- Elements has one simple toolbar and a context-sensitive work area that adjusts itself according to whatever editing task you're doing.

"We've taken that Adobe magic the pros use and simplified it," says Jim Mohan, Adobe director of product management for digital imaging and digital video. "We've made many of the complicated editing tasks in Photoshop really easy."

With Photoshop Elements, Adobe aims to offer a complete, end-to-end solution for digital camera owners, and it drives the point home by placing four brightly-colored tabs marked Import, Organize, Edit and Share right at the top of the interface.

The application automatically imports your photos as soon as you plug in your digital camera, eliminating much of the pain of getting your photos onto your computer.

Once they're in, Elements arranges your photos automatically by date, which it pulls from the files' metadata.

Click over to the "Organize" tab to start dragging your photos into albums. You can tag photos by entering the names of subjects, the places they were taken, or the name of the event.

In this respect, Photoshop Elements offers much of the same organizational capability as Apple's iPhoto. In fact, the application's redesigned interface looks a lot like iPhoto's.

Which isn't to say that if you already have iPhoto, you won't need Photoshop Elements. Adobe's knowledge and experience in creating killer photo-editing software is on display everywhere here, making it indispensable for users who love to tweak and tinker with their images.

There are tools to fix things like brightness and contrast, highlights and shadows, color inaccuracies and camera alignment.

But alongside the basics are more robust editing capabilities like Photo Merge, which allows a photo composite to be created from multiple shots of the same scene. Photo Merge is good for things like group shots, where one person has their eyes closed in one photo, and someone else is looking down in the second. But combine the two, and you have a great picture. As long as the camera position, subject and lighting are basically the same, the results are seamless.

Photoshop experts will recognize this as a simplified version of that application's Auto-align Layers and Auto-Blend Layers functions, which debuted in the recent Creative Suite 3 release. Only in Elements, the aligning, selecting and blending are accomplished with a few clicks and a single swipe of the mouse.

Other Photoshop features, such as the Variations dialog, which is used to correct color balance and brightness in photos, are carried over to Elements in much simpler forms. Also borrowed from the full version is the Selection Brush, which lets you select parts of an image by "painting" over them -- a blue sky or a green patch of grass, for example.

For true beginners, Photoshop Elements also offers a "guided" edit tour that offers a step-by-step, hands-on workshop, complete with text to explain what each step of the process accomplishes. Mohan likens the guided photo editing to a chapter of Photoshop for Dummies, right inside the application.

When it comes time to share, the coolest feature is a new "Map view" that lets users lay their photos out on a map provided by Yahoo. An interactive Flash photo gallery is generated. Post it to the web and your friends can browse photos from a road trip by zooming in and out on the map. The pictures pop up in boxes overlaid on top of the locations where they were taken.

There are some innovative Flash galleries that are sharable through e-mail or Adobe's Photoshop Showcase photo-hosting site, but they range from cute to downright cheesy. Maybe nice for the grandparents, but not for everyone else.

And it should be obvious that Photoshop Elements isn't for everyone, either. Pros and serious hobbyists will probably still prefer the more grown-up-looking Adobe Lightroom for their "Photoshop Lite" needs. But for the true newcomers, or even for Windows users who want a solid alternative to iPhoto for organizing their pictures, Photoshop Elements is a solid choice.

By Michael Calore

Source: http://www.wired.com/software/softwarereviews/news/2007/09/photoshop_elements6