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Photoshop Elements

Version: 8.0

Downloads Count: 80,702

License Type: Trial

Price: $100

Date Added: Sep 23, 2009

Operating Systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

Requirements: 1.6GHz or faster processor, 1GB RAM, 2GB available hard disk space, Microsoft DirectX 9, color monitor with 16-bit color video card

Author: Adobe

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Editorial Review of Photoshop Elements

Photoshop Elements delivers Photoshop's imaging power to consumers and hobbyist photographers in an accessible tabbed interface. In version 8, PSE offers a handful of new photo editing tools that are useful and fun, but its most compelling improvements are in digital asset management.

PSE's Organizer tab has several new tools to make keywording your photos easier. As soon as you start importing image files, the new Auto Analyzer gets to work, assessing the content of your pictures and applying special keywords called Smart Tags. Smart Tags identify images by predefined quality, focus, level of contrast, number of faces and/or objects, and so forth. What's more, Auto Analyzer initiates automatic face recognition. The more you identify specific people in photos, the better the program becomes at recognizing them--even at different ages, with other hairstyles, and with or without dark glasses.

Organizer acts as a conduit between Photoshop Elements and its sibling Premiere Elements. Selecting a photo launches PSE; selecting a video launches PRE if you have that program installed. Even if you don't have PRE, the Organizer will display and sort your videos, and it will allow you to keyword them.

You can back up the Organizer database and image files, share them, and sync them with other computers (that have an Elements program installed) via Photoshop.com, Adobe's photo-sharing Web site. PSE includes a basic Photoshop.com membership, with 2GB of online storage. For $40 more, a one-year Photoshop.com Plus membership includes 20GB of storage, plus access to Adobe's promised new tutorials, project templates, and other content.

The new Auto QuickFix tools (Smart Fix, Color, Tone, Contrast, Detail, Color, and Red Eye) in the Organizer's full-screen mode handle all the editing that many photos require. For photos that need special treatment, PSE's full edit interface is now more flexible, with quick icon-based alternatives for arranging multiple pictures on your screen, plus resizable, self-adjusting tool panels similar to those in Photoshop CS4.

Among PSE 8's handful of new or extended photo editing tools is an Exposure tool that allows you to combine two nearly identical photos taken with different exposure values. The auto mode attains optimum exposure on some pictures, but other images may need tweaking via the manual tools, in which you select the areas to be combined--a task that demands some good hand-eye-cursor coordination for best results.

A less fussy new tool is Recompose, which allows you to make photo fit into a specific size or orientation by choosing which elements of the picture to remove and which ones to keep. For instance, if you have a horizontal photo of five people, and you want to change it to a vertical orientation without distorting the figures, you can select which of the five and/or what portions of the background to eliminate, and which ones stitch together into a recomposed photo. It's especially nice that when you're working on a project, such as a photo collage, you can right-click a picture Recompose it without leaving the project.

In the Create tab, PSE 8 offers additional templates and content for making photo books, calendars, greeting cards, stamps, prints, collages, and slide shows. The Share tab has delightful new Flash templates for sharing photos and videos digitally.

Version 8 upholds Photoshop Elements' reputation as a top consumer-level photo editing program. Its new edit tools, content, and templates are appealing. For PSE 7 users, though, the primary reason to upgrade to 8 is the new edition's improved facility for keywording and managing your media. If your collection of photos is small, you may be fine sticking with 7.

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you must register to download the software.

--Sally Wiener Grotta & Daniel Grotta

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