Product Reviews

Adobe PhotoDeluxe still trundles on, we understand, as Adobe's entry-level image-editing program, but since its launch, Photoshop Elements has rapidly taken over as the standard bundled application with countless new digital cameras, scanners and other digital imaging peripherals.

Elements caused a storm on its arrival with its elegant yet effective interface, and its successful blending of many fancy features from Adobe's flagship image editor, Photoshop, into an inexpensive and accessible package. Indeed, the original version of Photoshop Elements has remained our current Top 50 image editing program ever since.

High points included palettes that collapsed when not in use, a range of effects and filters applied with nothing more complicated than a drag-and-drop action, and 'Hints' and 'Recipes' palettes that told you what was going on and helped you do more. Elements is particularly good at offering beginner-friendly tools in an environment that can grow along with your skills.

If the original was so good, what could Adobe hope to achieve with Elements 2? Not surprisingly, it's just more of the same, with a collection of tweaks and modifications that aren't earth-shattering in themselves, but add up to a useful upgrade.

All-new features include a Quick Fix dialog, a Selection Brush for 'painting' selections on your images, the ability to capture individual video frames and to

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It's the enhancements to an existing feature that might come in most useful, though. Elements 1 introduced a File Browser palette, which even Photoshop itself didn't have at the time. But the thumbnail images weren't cached, so you faced a lengthy wait whenever you opened a folder full of high-resolution images, even one that you'd opened before.

That's now been fixed, and in Elements 2 the File Browser can also display EXIF digital camera data - the camera's make and model, exposure time, aperture, quality setting and more. You can drag it off the palette and display it as a separate window, too.

PhotoMerge, for creating panoramic photos, has been improved to cope with higher-resolution images, the range of Recipes has been extended and both Picture Package (which arranges multiple photos on a single sheet) and Web Photo Gallery offer more options, too.

Elements is better than ever, then. But its rivals are good too, so is Elements the best mid-range image-editor around right now? For digital photographers, it probably is. It's more photographer-friendly than PhotoImpact or Paint Shop Pro, and a good deal less cluttered and fussy in use. It's a lot cheaper, too - particularly if you get it bundled with a new bit of hardware. For in-depth image-editing, though, Elements does have limitations, and one of these is its lack of support for masks.

In other respects, though, it's a great all-round creative package. The new Selection Brush is undoubtedly useful, and Elements shares Photoshop's excellent Layer Styles. You can create editable text, vector shapes and natural media brushstrokes too.

Indeed, Elements is a program with many hidden depths, and it's a testament to the neatness of Adobe's now-familiar stacking-palette interface design that you can uncover these features at your own pace. On the surface, Elements is a friendly and capable image-editor; underneath, it's a whole lot more.

The best just got better.