Product Reviews

Adobe's flagship image editing program, Photoshop, is a standard tool for professional digital photographers and reprographic studios, but at £300 it's well beyond the budget of idle dabblers. Its huge range of features also makes it mind-bogglingly difficult for beginners.

Photoshop Elements, now in its third incarnation, takes the most important tools of its big sister, and packages them in an accessible way, adding a number of handy functions, such as a photo organiser.

Adobe has made a few changes since the previous version - most notably, by turning one integrated application into a number of distinct tasks, enabling users to dart in and out of the program and head straight for the tools they need. The first of these is the Photo Organizer - pretty standard fare these days. It allows you to catalogue and tag image files, using either ready-made categories such as People or Places, or groups of your own.

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Photos can be searched by category, or using a number of other 'smart' features, such as ranking images by the similarity of their colours. You can also search attached notes by keyword.

The hub of the package is Editor, basically a cut-down Photoshop. Some palettes - Layers, for example - function identically. Others, such as Styles and Effects, allow beginners to apply ready-made effects to produce slick results. Repetitive tasks, such as fixing a colour cast (if your camera always errs on the reddish side, say), can be handled automatically. Tools for contrast, colour and exposure are less flexible than those offered by Paint Shop Pro, but good enough for everyday use. Elements also offers a built-in PhotoMerge tool for creating panoramas. A How To palette offers quick and practical advice on a range of tasks, making Elements much more manageable than professional editors. To make things easier still, you can switch Editor into Quick Fix mode. This repackages tools from the Image menu to adjust lighting or colour using simple sliders, as well applying filters and other effects.

The improvements made between Photoshop Elements 3 and the previous version are more organisational than technical. If you already own version 2, there's no pressing need to upgrade - unless, of course, you're after esoteric features such as support for Apple's iPod Photo. If you don't already own an image editor, and you've no need for professional features such as output to four-colour film, it's the easiest around.