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.

Levels
This can be the single most effective edit you can apply to a photo, particularly one that’s not been brilliantly exposed. If the exposure isn’t perfect – and sometimes even if it is – the tonal range of a digital photo can be clumped into a narrow area. In a digital photo, pixels are represented as numbers, so the idea is to expand the tonal range so it covers as much of the numeric range available as possible. The effect of expanding the range is to give shots much more punch and contrast. It’s easier to do than to explain, see head to the GIMP and select Tools | Colour Tools | Levels.
In the Input Levels box, you’ll see a lumpy graph. This is the histogram of the image, which shows the number of pixels in the image at each intensity: pure black on the extreme left, up to pure white on the far right, with the greys in between. The higher the hill the more pixels at that level of brightness. If the ‘foothills’ of the graph on either side don’t reach to the edges, the image is ripe for a bit of levels tweaking.

Drag the left-hand arrow beneath the histogram to the point at which the foothills begin on the left, and then drag the right-hand arrow on the right to the point at which the foothills begin on the right, thusly:

You may find that when you drag the right-hand arrow in, things get excessively bright: it depends on the image. If it does, drag the arrow back a little bit. When you hit OK, the tonal range of the image is expanded by pulling dark greys down to black and off-whites up to bright white.
If you’ve done it right, the difference between the before and after versions of the images should be quite marked. With a badly exposed image it can look as if a veil has been lifted from the shot and everything is much clearer. Here’s a genuine example of a before and after, showing the difference it can make – levels was the only edit we applied:

Hue/Saturation
This is where you can cheat a little bit and make your pictures better than real life by artificially enhancing the colurs. Levels gives your images punch and increasing the saturation – in other words the richness of the colours – can add nicely to that effect. The key with this one – as with most effects – is not to overdo it. The effect itself is simple enough to apply in GIMP – just pop to Tools | Colour Tools | Hue/Saturation. Don’t tweak the Hue or Lightness sliders – just tweak the Saturation slider up a bit.:

If you go past 15 you’re probably overdoing it: between 5 and 15 is usually the best range to give the colours a lift:

Sharpness

If you resize a photo down to web size, or you want to print it off at maximum resolution, you’ll find that applying a sharpening routine can really enhance the detail. Somewhat unintuitively, the most effective sharpening tool is called ‘unsharp mask’. In GIMP you’ll find this clever widget in the Filters | Enhance | Unsharp Mask menu.

Before you apply unsharp mask, always zoom your shot into 100%, otherwise you’ll overdo it and not realise. In GIMP just go to View | Zoom and select 1:1 (100%). Again, being sparing is the key to avoiding nasty artefacts. For a print-size (in other words high-resolution shot that you’ve not resized) try a Radius setting of 1.0, Amount at 0.50 and Threshold at 0. For a photo that you’ve downsized for the web – apply the sharpening after the resize – try being a little bit more aggressive. Experimenting is the key but always bear in mind the golden rule of not overdoing it:

And that’s it – these are the three essential adjustments you should make as a matter of course to all your shots. After a bit of practise each step will take only a few seconds, and it’s very well worth the effort.