Product Reviews

After a wait of more than two years, Adobe has released a major upgrade to its entry-level image editing application. Aimed at digital imaging hobbyists and those who find the Photoshop learning curve too steep, Photoshop Elements 3 includes new advanced features, many of which have migrated from Photoshop CS, as well as additions and enhancements designed to make life simpler for novices.

A revamped image browser incorporates nearly all the functions of the Photoshop CS browser, providing powerful sort and search features, batch processing and custom view options. Likewise, Photoshop's Camera Raw plug-in has made the transition virtually untouched. Elements now supports 16-bit RGB images; the filter gallery, photo filters, and healing brush (supplemented by a simpler one-touch spot healing brush) are other Photoshop migrants.

At the other end of the curve, there are new photo and palette bins, quick fix and smart fix features, one-step colour adjustment and red-eye correction tools, crop presets, an improved shadows/highlight command, a cookie cutter, noise reduction filter, histogram palette and a neat trick to simplify multiple scanning.

The new browser looks like the old one, but it now does so much more. It's still divided into four windows: a folder view, preview, info window and thumbnail window. The info window now sports metadata and keyword tabs. The IPTC metadata section is editable, allowing you to enter description, keyword, author and copyright details for multiple images. You can similarly define and add keywords, which can subsequently be used as the basis for sorting and searching. The omission of the Photoshop CS feature that allows you to assign a numeric rank to images in the browser is a bit of a disappointment though.

Four menus provide access to the remaining browser functions including view customisation, thumbnail and image rotation and sort by category. In addition to the excellent batch renaming functions, you can apply automatic levels, contrast, colour and sharpen adjustments to a folder of images and simultaneously resize and convert them using the process multiple files dialogue.

The PDF slide show, Contact Sheet II, Photomerge, Picture Package and web photo gallery features have been integrated into the browser, and

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all of them work with multiple images.

Small changes to the Elements 3 workspace make life easier, particularly when working with multiple image windows and on small displays. The toolbar has been docked to a single-row window on the left (from where it can be removed) and the palette well has been replaced by a retractable palette bin docked to the right of the screen. At the bottom, the new photo bin displays thumbnails of each open image which, when clicked, bring that image to the front.

As well as single image and tiled modes, you can synchronise zoom factor, location and scrolling across several windows. This is handy for retouching, where you can work at high magnification and see the 100 percent view in another window, and for cloning using different images as source and target. If this feature doesn't make it into the next Photoshop upgrade we'd be both surprised and disappointed.

Pressing the Quick Fix button at the top of the screen switches to a 'before' and 'after' preview mode with tools ranged down the right side. At the top, a catch-all smartfix slider sorts out lighting, contrast and colour problems. For more complex problems, individual lighting, colour and sharpen controls are provided. Each of these has a commit/cancel button and there's a global reset button, so disaster recovery is simple.

The new healing brush works in exactly the same fashion as Photoshop's and is every bit as effective - command-click to define a source area and then brush away spots and blemishes while retaining original tones. For smaller spots and scratches there's also a spot healing brush that does away with the source selection stage, apparently analysing the surrounding areas for the best match. For small marks and blemishes this works very well.

Element 2's fill flash tool was useful in an emergency, but lacked the subtle control of the Photoshop Shadow/Highlight command that it evolved into. Now Shadows/Highlights has returned to Elements with some new tricks. It's still not as good as the Photoshop version, but the addition of separate sliders to lighten shadows and darken highlights as well as a midtone contrast adjustment makes it a much more effective tool.

As more and more mid-range fixed-lens digital cameras are providing a raw file format, it's perhaps no surprise that Elements 3 includes Camera Raw support. The plug-in is very similar to that in Photoshop CS. It lacks the advanced lens and calibrate tabs, substituting auto adjustment options on the exposure, shadows, brightness and contrast sliders.

Inevitably, detractors will point to the lack of actions, vector tools, layer masks and CMYK support as serious shortcomings, but let's not forget, the point of Elements is its ease of use. With this combination of Photoshop-style new features and beginners' quick-fix tools, Adobe has got the balance exactly right.