Product Reviews

Elements 2.0 is an upgrade toAdobe's cut-down version of Photoshop, bringing an enhanced feature set, greater ease of use and many automated tasks to the low-end image editing program.

Aimed at the amateur user, Elements 2.0 incorporates much of the power of Photoshop but has some notable omissions: there's no CMYK mode, no Pen tool and no Curves dialog.

In place of the Curves dialog, Elements features an intuitive Quick Fix dialog, which takes the user through the steps of correcting a poor scan. The new Fill Flash dialog compensates for backlit images using sliders to adjust the saturation and brightness of the image. The enhanced Color Variations dialog makes Photoshop's Variations tool easier to use, enabling users to make quick colour changes.

The File Browser, first introduced in Elements 1.0, has been updated to include most of the feature set from Photoshop - including capturing EXIF data from digital cameras. Skewed scanned images can now be automatically rotated and cropped using the Straighten and Crop Image command.

Photomerge, the technology for automatically building panoramas from a selection of images, has been enhanced to handle larger files. It also includes perspective correction, allowing the user to define the vanishing point for more convincing results - individual images can now be dragged out of the composite into a holding area, allowing fine adjustments to be made on the fly. Photomerge has yet to make it into Photoshop proper, but it's such a useful tool that many professional users may be tempted to buy Elements to gain it.

The new Selection Brush works in a similar way to QuickMask in Photoshop, using a soft-edged brush to make selections. It's a far easier selection tool to use than the Lasso, although it can be hard to judge soft edges, and it's possible to leave holes inside selections if you switch between large

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and small brushes to complete selections (the technique recommended in Elements).

Photoshop veterans will recognise this tool as QuickMask without the mask mode. It remains to be seen whether new users will take to a tool that creates feathered selections without always showing the edges accurately.

Several technologies have been imported, in cut-down versions, from Photoshop 7. There's now a History palette (but no History brush), allowing users to step backwards through the image editing process. A cheaper implementation of Photoshop's innovative new brush engine enables users to experiment with such variables as spacing, fade, colour jitter and scattering.

Swept away

Natural media styles, introduced in Photoshop 7, are included among the custom brushes. The brush preview, formerly a round icon showing the hardness or a single dab of a custom brush, now follows Photoshop in showing a stroke drawn with that brush.

The emphasis throughout is on ease of use and the program begins with the Welcome screen, which gives users the option of creating a new image from scratch, opening a file from disk or camera, scanning an image, or beginning a new tutorial using the Recipes cards.

The Hints palette provides information about each tool and process, while a new Search field in the menu bar allows users to search for help and displays the results in a new window in Internet Explorer. Colour management, a notoriously sticky area, has been reduced to three choices: None, Limited (optimised for Web graphics) and Full (optimised for print).

There are many other innovations. A new Frame from Video dialog pulls still images from QuickTime files, the Liquefy dialog now supports pressure-sensitive tablets, and many more vector shapes have been added to the Drawing Tools (shapes) library.

Sharing files with others has been made even better through two new features; Create PDF Slideshows, which uses Acrobat Reader to create presentations; and Attach to Email, which automatically sizes images and attaches them to an email message. A new Batch Processing feature will convert file types, resize and rename files.

Elements 2.0 provides a great introduction to digital imaging, offering much of the power of Photoshop in a supportive environment. While the lack of CMYK and clipping paths means it won't be of use to the graphics professional it's the easiest way to learn Photoshop without having to pay for the full package.