Earlier today Adobe announced the latest version of its best-selling consumer-oriented photo-editing and organization package Photoshop Elements 8. This has become something of a yearly event and the previous version 7 release clearly suffered from the tight turnaround in a Creative Suite year. By comparison, version 8 is packed with new power and has a strong focus: building on Adobe’s state-of-the-art image analysis to bring the best out of images and to make life easier for the end user.

Editing highlights include the new Photo Merge mode that automatically picks out and combines the best exposed areas of bracketed shots to produce a best-lit composite image and the Image Recompose feature that automatically preserves foreground objects while removing unwanting backgrounds as you resize your image – in real time.

Elements’ editing power remains unchallenged in the consumer arena but, for most users, serious editing images is a relatively rare requirement compared to the regular chore of getting on top of your images through tagging. Here Adobe’s image analysis expertise promises even more, holding out the prospect of automatically tagging images based on quality and – through automatic face recognition – even subject.

It sounds great on paper and works brilliantly with the sample images included in the pre-release press pack, but how does it work in practice with real images?

Badly.

The problem of course is that real images contain faces at angles, partially obscured, in shadow, out of focus and so on. Elements does a surprisingly good job of picking most of these up and even identifying them. However it also picks up many false positives and unwanted faces which waste time. More importantly, it doesn’t pick up all the people that you would tag if you were doing it manually. Which renders the whole process pretty much useless – you’re still going to have go through image-by-image to get exactly the tags that you want.

Photoshop Elements 8 proves even worse when it comes to judging quality. I’m happy to accept that Photoshop can determine whether an image has an ideal tonal range, or is underexposed, or low in contrast, or whatever. But that’s always going to be a secondary consideration to the composition of the photo, whether your subjects’ eyes are shut etc.

Ultimately the best and only sensible judge of what your photos are of and which of them are any good is you. As discussed in more detail in the full Photoshop Elements 8 review (now published), Adobe’s well-intentioned attempts to be helpful backfire and end up adding complexity and wasting time.

It’s lucky the editing power is so good.