Adobe Photoshop Elements 8: First Look

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

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?

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Three Steps to Punchier Christmas Photos

Friday, December 26th, 2008

New digital camera? Good stuff. But hold your horses: you should learn how to use three simple software tools, which you can apply to almost all your photos and which is almost guaranteed to improve them. None of them takes more than a few seconds and they can enhance the look of the dreariest shot immensely. Those steps are known as levels, saturation and sharpening.
So load up the photo-editing software that you’ve no doubt got lurking on your hard disk somewhere. If you haven’t got any, download a nice free copy of the GIMP, which despite the name is a free photo-editing package, not something your ISP should be blocking. We’re going to use GIMP 2.6 for the shots here. Most other photo editors – including Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS4 – are more or less identical as far as the way these basic tools work.

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