Photoshop Elements essentially comprises of a couple of programs designed to make it easy — and fun — for home users to organise, correct, enhance and generally get the best out of their digital photo collection. A powerful browser utility, the Elements Organizer, helps you preview and sort out your pictures and other media files, while the main Photoshop Elements program is used for handling the editing work.
Photoshop Elements 8 (PSE 8) is available now for AU$165 (upgrade AU$125). You can also get it bundled with Premiere Elements 8 for AU$245. Let's take a look at the new features.
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Photoshop Elements 8
Both PSE 8 and Premiere Elements 8 include an updated version of the Organizer which supports people- and geotagging as well as some non-photo file formats. As usual, the editor itself includes some features trickled down from Photoshop CS4, like Photomerge Exposure, which combines multiple similar source images for optimal exposure; Content-Aware Scaling, here dubbed "Recompose", which drops unwanted objects out of photos as you scale down; and Quick Fix previews for less parametric and more visually-based photo editing.
(Credit: Adobe)
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Mapping and tag clouds
Version 8 adds the ability to tag photo files with addresses — if they're not geotagged already — and display or select them based on location. Also, in addition to its traditional hierarchical tag structure, you can also view tag clouds, which (theoretically) depict more popular tags with larger fonts. I couldn't find a way to hide unused tags, however, which makes this scheme less useful than it could be.
(Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET)
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Greater visualisation
The Quick Fix pane now offers variation previews for every adjustment option. This is a great way to learn the effects different adjustments will have on your photos, but after a while some people might find it too distracting a way to work (at which point they can jump into the full editor, which provides a much more Photoshop CS4-like experience).
(Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET)
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Photomerge Exposure, automatic
The new Photomerge Exposure tool, adapted from Photoshop senior, ironically seems to work best automatically than when fiddled with.
(Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET)
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Photomerge Exposure, manual
There doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correspondence between the paint-on-mask and the selected regions for the Photomerge and I couldn't find a way to adjust the tolerance of the selections (so that it didn't spread to all the adjacent dark areas to the ones selected, for instance), which made fine tuning the merge difficult.
(Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET)
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It's time for some dialogs to die
I think this is the same JPEG options dialog that was in the first version of Photoshop to support the format. Do any consumers even know (or care) what the difference is between the different format options? Time for some tidying of the UI, Adobe.
(Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET)
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Living on the edge
Adobe certainly isn't the only software manufacturer to invoke FUD to try to convince you to use a feature, but it's the one that's currently in my face. I'm sure the language is simply some marketer's attempt to remind you what the feature does, but accusing me of not wanting to "protect" my "precious memories"? Perhaps it should say "No — Leave it OFF. I don't want to have to spend US$50 a year on a premium subscription to Photoshop.com when this feature drives me past my 2GB limit or face getting cut off when I unknowingly hit my ISP's broadband cap" might work, too. Or the less verbose "No, I don't want Organizer to backup or synchronise my files".
(Screenshot by Lori Grunin/CNET)
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