Adobe Photoshop Elements occupies a photo editing niche, in between full-on professional editors such as its parent, Photoshop, and budget and freeware applications such as Google’s Picasa.
With the rise of online editors such as Adobe’s own Photoshop Express, space in this market is getting tight, and Adobe knows that to keep ahead of its rivals it needs to offer ever greater ease of use combined with innovative features.
But with Photoshop Elements 7, Adobe could have the answer. It’s really two integrated applications – a photo organiser and an editor. The former allows you to rate pictures, add captions, keyword tags and other metadata and organise them into albums.
The only significant addition here, however, is a text search feature. Entering a text string in the new text search box finds all images in the catalogue that include the text either in filenames, tags, captions, or other metadata fields. This is such a basic requirement it’s hard to believe it’s been absent until now.
More exciting are the changes to the editing facilities. This begins with Elements’ editing modes, now split into three different categories: Quick Fix, Guided Edit and Full, in order of sophistication and complexity.
Quick Fix provides one-click auto adjustments to correct exposure and colour problems. And the Touch Up section of the Quick Fix panel now sports two new brushes for whitening teeth and making skies more blue.
To whiten teeth, or “fix” hazy skies, you just paint them with a “smart” brush. The smart selection component of the tool automatically – and surprisingly accurately – selects just the bits you need and applies the correction.
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| Smartbrushes provide more options and scope for editing |
You can change the brush size, but that’s the only option; the intensity of the effects is fixed. The teeth whitening tool also doubles up as an effective dodging brush, selectively brightening anything to which it’s applied.
Switch to Full Edit mode and the Layers palette reveals what’s happening beneath the surface with these Smart Brushes. They combine the Quick Selection tool introduced in Photoshop Elements 6 with masked adjustment layers. You can go further with the Smart Brush tool in Full Edit mode.
The tool options bar provides an impressive array of effects that can be applied with the brush, including cloud contrast, antique contrast, bright eyes, greenery (to intensify foliage) and a range of colour and monochrome toning effects. Some of the effects are editable. Greenery is a straightforward Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, while you can also directly edit the layer mask to extend or confine the effect to certain parts of the image.
Photoshop Elements’ guided editing module has also been expanded to include Photoshop-like actions – macros that apply a sequence of edits to an image. The new Action Player includes a small number of actions for adding a caption bar, resizing and cropping and a handful of special effects. But even though Elements can be coerced into playing some Photoshop-created actions, it’s not possible to record them.
And no Adobe upgrade would be complete without a killer new feature. In Elements 7’s case it’s Photomerge Scene Cleaner. Building on existing Photomerge features, which allow you to combine facial features from different shots, Photomerge Scene Cleaner automatically removes unwanted detail from images.
The tool requires at least two shots of the same scene. Suppose you take a shot of your best friend in front of the Eiffel Tower, but just as you press the shutter a man cycles past. So you take another shot but fail to spot a small child in the background with a balloon.
No problem: Scene Cleaner automatically removes the offenders, replacing them with background detail from the photo in which they are absent – just draw a line on them with the pencil tool. Detailed instruction on how to do this is provided in the Guided Edit panel, and the quality of the guidance is generally much improved on version 6.
Other enhancements include a new line drawing action, a surface blur effect for smoothing skin in portraits, enhanced photo books and extended camera raw support. It’s all good, but what existing Elements users and those new to digital photo editing will really appreciate is the clever way in which Adobe has introduced new easy-to-use features while extending its appeal to advanced users. In that regard Elements 7 represents a significant advance on 6 and, as such, retains its place on our A List.