Comments on: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8: First Look

By: Nick Cross

Nick Cross — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:59:51 +0000

I have bought Elements as I wanted both the Organizer features and to start editing more of my photos.

Unfortunately the Organizer is *incredibly* unstable and crashes constantly. This is on a clean install of XP with no third party software running. I have also encountered various other bugs included corrupting my JPEGs (I had to restore from backup). These problems are backed up by others e.g. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/504803?tstart=30
While the editor might be good value it is badly let down by the organizer.

Adobe seem to have no intention of fixing 2 year old issues and just introduce new bugs with offshored development. They do not release bug fixes.

Conclusion – do **NOT** buy. Picasa or IDImager are far better alternatives (I have unfortunately learned in hindsight).

By: Felix

Felix — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:40:19 +0000

Tom: You’ve just reminded me of something. Windows Live Photo Gallery. Okay, yes I know but for the odd panoramic photos I’m sure its fine and its free. (just cover up the name if you must)

Actually as an MCP but a Mac home user I really think iPhoto is the better choice, its cheaper than PSE for a start.

JD: I feel your pain, however if you have so many photos to catalog, may I suggest Aperture 2 from Apple. I promise you will never look back.

Also JD, as a side note, do a search on google “Parallels vs VMware Fusion”. My apology in advance.

By: John

John — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:58:01 +0000

Why can’t adobe on it’s site state whether Elemenst 8 supports Vista 64 OS? I have searched the web and still have found no definite answer. Is it a big secret or what?

By: jd

jd — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:45:24 +0000

I’ve been using pse for five years but primarily as an organizer and less as a photo editor. My catalog has over 18,000 images and seems to work well. Picasa and iPhoto both seemed unable to handle this size of a catalog but I admit that work was done some time ago. I hate having to run pse in parallels on my iMac but I’ve not found a consumer rated organizer that does as well. I tried lightroom ($300) but didn’t see a $200 difference so I stuck with pse. Now that I’ve spent so much time in tagging and identifying pictures in pse I’m pretty well stuck.

I am going to try exporting the photo meta data in pse and importing it into iPhoto, but from what I hear there is a lot of functionality lost when this is done.

I will probably skip pse 8 and wait for a windows/7 version when I upgrade my parallels guest os sometime next year.

By: Tom Arah

Tom Arah — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:25:07 +0000

Chris: Totally agree that Picasa offers all that many users will need (see full review at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/237318/picasa-3).

However it’s not a serious editor. If you want capabilities like photo merging for panoramas and combining the best elements from multiple shots and hands-on tools you’re sometimes going to need a serious editor and Elements offers the best around.

Felix: Very good point. I expected Adobe to make more of a tie-in between Elements and photoshop.com but instead it’s gone with flashy albums and the woeful photoshopshowcase.com

Harry: Yes it is a high upgrade price. I think they must work on the basis that users will only upgrade every couple of releases.

Doosh: My understanding of previous releases was that it generally worked but that Adobe didn’t specifically support it (http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshopelements-6-7-faq.htm#_PSE_and_Vista). Couldn’t see anything on the Adobe site about the new release.

By: doosh

doosh — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:32:44 +0000

I have purchased Elements 7 bundle only to find out it did not work on Vista 64. Nothing about this on the box or in your magazine. Will this, version 8 work with 64 bits?
It is funny adding these bits and pieces. Why can’t they include something more usefull like a duplicate finder in the organizer.

By: Harry

Harry — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:14:05 +0000

I think the upgrade price that Adobe usually offers to existing users is a even bigger rip-off. Typically they only offer a £10 discount to users of the previous version and often you can buy the full version for less than the official upgrade price if you shop around.

By: Felix

Felix — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:20:03 +0000

I agree with Chris. I can’t justify the cost of Elements when Picasa will do for most “casual photographers”. In addition, recently I discovered the power of online photo editing tools. PhotoShop Online (registration required) or completely free to use http://www.pixlr.com. They offer some of the missing features in Picasa or Elements.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:36:26 +0000

In your review can you explain why casual photographers would not be better off just using Picasa? I have nothing against Elements, I just can’t see why I should buy a copy.