Adobe Photoshop Elements: A Powerful Program For Digital Imaging
Written: Aug 19 '01 (Updated Jun 27 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easier to learn than PhotoShop
Cons: Still a complex graphics program.
The Bottom Line: If you have the time to spend with this program, and can live without some features found in PhotoShop, it can save you hundreds of $$$!
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| rpllingrock's Full Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements Upgrade Version Governmen... |
With the explosion of Digital Cameras and Imaging, Adobe has finally noticed that home users are interested in simple image editing, and of course, manipulation. We don’t want to spend hours learning a program. Low and behold we have the Adobe PhotoShop Elements offering!
This opinion is for Adobe PhotoShop Elements (APSE) version 1 on Windows 2000 with 256 MB RAM on a Athlon 1.33 GHz, and video running GeForce 2 MX (LeadTek) @ 64 MB.
I hope to cover a few items in this program that I use regularly, but it is impossible for me to list all of the features this program contains and keep this under 4000 words. ;)
A full list can be had on their web site at http://www.adobe.com.
It is not possible for me to accurately compare this to Adobe PhotoShop because of my limited experience with the program, but I can make comparisons to Paint Shop Pro.
What Can I Accomplish With Elements?
My main need for a graphic editing program is aiding in the restoration of old, and I mean old family photographs, and editing/enhancing photos with my current obsession with digital imaging.
With Elements I can perform the basics, crop, rotate, resize, but any program worth its salt can do the same. This program enables me to take it a few steps further by allowing me to utilize the power of Adobe PhotoShop (APS) minus some features. Some of these missing features are Image Ready, and the channel and paths palette, which I had no use for anyway.
Where Does This Program Fall
After using Adobe’s PhotoDeluxe for a short time, I was turned off by its simplicity. Offering minimal graphics manipulation, its “dummy” approach really irked me. I likened it to Microsoft’s Picture It!. Don’t get me wrong, many people are happy with this approach, but I for one wanted a simple to use, but fairly powerful program, and I wasn’t willing to plunk down hundreds of dollars for APS.
The few times I did try APS, I was left confused. Most of my digital image editing was done with Micrografx Picture Publisher from versions 3 to 8, with a rich GUI, where as earlier versions of APS options were driven by pull down menus. These have been replaced by an easy to get to shortcuts toolbar.
APS LE, a watered down version of its big brother, was not the answer, and it too was just as confusing.
Thankfully, Adobe PhotoShop Elements (APSE) falls nicely between APS and PhotoDeluxe. It has some of the power of APS, with a little handholding of PhotoDeluxe. It appears that this program was aimed to compete directly with Paint Shop Pro by Jasc, an excellent graphics utility.
In a nutshell, it is PhotoShop with a set of training wheels minus about $500!
Features I Liked
· Online Tutorial- I recommend taking this for a ride upon installation. It covers all the basics and can smooth your transition from whatever program you’re using now.
· Recipes- Other graphic utility programs call them Wizards. A set image editing tools to help with tasks such as GIF animation, redeye removal, and text manipulation. Many of these features can be done with APS, but with sometimes hours of learning and practice.
· Enhancement Tools
Auto Enhance to adjust both brightness and contrast levels, and it has become my best friend. By allowing the program to guess the correct levels of each, the end result is astounding, and rarely do I have to make any further adjustments to the image. If I knew enough about photography and lighting I wouldn’t need to lean on this as much as I do! ;) The alternative to this is to make adjustments via the Histogram.
Fill Flash to fill in where a flash failed to light the subject properly. In this case, too much of a good thing is bad! More often than not, the end result looks terrible and unnatural. So take it easy!
Color Cast which automatically adjusts the mixture of colors. Take the eyedropper and place it on a white, black, or gray area, click, and the adjustments are made automatically. I’ve tried many color correction schemes out there, and this is among the very best.
· Straightening Scanned Photos- In the old days, (about 2 years ago) I accomplished this by rotating a crooked scan by hand, guessing how many degrees to rotate. APSE takes care of this for me automatically. I was quite pleased with the end result.
· Panorama Images (Called Photomerge)- I’ve dabbled with this idea in the past using a program by ArcSoft and with limited success. Making panoramas consists of taking a series of images in a 360 (or less)- degree fashion and reassembling (merging) these images to create the panoramic effect. It was possible to achieve greater results with APSE, but you have to work for it!
How It’s Done:
Just load up the images you want put into the panorama and allow APSE to guess where they line up. Once at the photomerge interface, drag the images onto the workspace. You’re allowed to rotate images freely within the workspace, making it much easier to align. I especially like the option to ghost or blend while dragging.
There is a lot more that’s involved in making successful panoramic images, camera focus, subject lighting and distance to name a few. Best results will be obtained by using a tripod when taking your digital images.
· Effects Palette- Actually a collection of macros for image and text effects. Just drag the effect to your image and presto! Some of these macros carry several commands that require multiple undos to remove. This is most annoying.
· The ability to use PhotoShop Filters
· The ability to copy text from MS Word or any text based program to my current image project, and the ability to save it in .PDF format.
What I Didn’t Like
· The fact that some of the effects on the Effects Palette needed multiple undos. This to me was very annoying and a waste of time.
· Besides the wizards and some of the features that Adobe made readily accessible, and therefore eliminating most the time required to learn these, the program fails to be Plug and Play for most home users. It still requires hours of learning to fully utilize all of its capabilities.
· Hints Palette- I was expecting great things from this, but was quickly disappointed by the vague info it provided. When you click a tool it describes what the tool is and its use. The info provided is practically useless. For example, click on the pencil and you’ll get, Draws hard edged freehand lines on an image What? That’s it? Clicking More Help brings up an HTML help file with more info, which by the way is fairly good.
· The tools to repair heavily damaged scans are not as extensive as I originally thought. For example, to remove scratches and dust, instead of treating just a small portion on the fly, it is necessary to mask the area to repair and apply the filter to each area. Very time consuming compared to Paint Shop’s approach of scratch removal.
Overall
If you just bought a digital camera and want a program that will handle 99% of the basic and not so basic tasks required to manipulate and enhance a collection of images, and you have the patience, then I can recommend Adobe PhotoShop Elements without hesitation. If you have limited time, or just can’t be bothered to learn the ins and outs, then try Paint Shop Pro, also available in demo form. It is, in my opinion, a more useful application for touching up old scanned photos.
As I use Elements over time, I find myself using it more. I still prefer to use Paint Shop. Part of this reason is my resistance to change. I went through the same scenario when switching from Netscape to Internet Explorer. Little by little, day-by-day, I weaned myself from Netscape, and here I sit today, Netscape Free! :(
You can download a 30-day Demo here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopel/demoreg.html
Recommended:
Yes
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