Product Reviews

Photoshop Elements 4, the baby brother to Photoshop CS2, provides 90% of the functionality of the full application in a simplified, user-friendly environment. The new version brings a range of tools and processes designed to make the task of editing, enhancing and printing digital images easier than ever before.

Aimed squarely at the home market, Elements 4 offers several tools not found in the full version of Photoshop. The emphasis throughout is on ease of use, and while this is occasionally at the expense of some precision and accuracy, it has gone a long way to demystifying the manipulation process.

Red-eye caused by too much flash is a common problem. Elements has now introduced a fully automatic red-eye solution: pressing command-R will now remove all instances of red-eye in a photograph. No selections, no painting needed: the entire image is processed, eyes are located, and the redness removed, all in one shot. We found the process worked perfectly in most cases - and it's quite astonishing to watch it happen. However, as you'd expect, not all images produced the same quality of result: in some, the redness was replaced by an unnatural blackness; in others, only one eye would be corrected, producing a rather bizarre result. Nonetheless, it's a useful, time-saving technology.

Performing cutouts has always been a tricky task, despite the best efforts of tools such as the Magic Lasso. The Magic Extractor is a modal dialog that makes the process far simpler. Beginning with the Foreground Brush tool, you click or even scribble within the area you want to keep. Then, switching to the Background Brush tool, click or scribble on the area you want removed. Hit the Preview button and, after a few seconds, the background disappears.

In our tests, the tool worked surprisingly well, even with complex backgrounds. Of course, you have to do some tidying up. The dialog has additional tools for revealing and hiding the image by painting over it, as well as tools for smoothing selections, defringing and filling holes.

This is significant: Elements has no equivalent of Photoshop's layer masks, which means it has been over-reliant on the Eraser tools in the past. However, version 4's ability to paint layer areas in and out brings increased editing capabilities. Even if you choose not to use the main Extract technology, this appearance of masking by the back door is very welcome.

For those who want to make quick selections without having to go through a dialog, the new Magic Selection Brush uses just the brush part of the Magic Extractor, and lets you work directly on the canvas. The process is similar: scribble over the area you want to select and, after a couple of seconds, it will be shown with standard selection borders; hold down the alt key and scribble over unwanted areas to remove them.

Tidying up is more fiddly without the Extractor tool set, requiring deft use of the Lasso tool and standard Selection Brush, but it's a great way to make quick selections of objects on less complex backgrounds.

To make colour correction easier, there's a new adjustment called Adjust Color for Skin Tone. Clicking on the skin of a person within the image will begin the process and normalise the skin tones for the entire image. There are only three

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user controls, but they're significant: a Tan slider moves between pale and dark skin, while a Blush slider adds the amount of red. In addition, an Ambient Light slider lets you compensate for the colour temperature of the original image, so if someone looks blue in a snow scene, for example, it's possible to adjust the skin tones without changing the colour of the snow. It's an excellent, well-implemented adjustment that's both powerful and easy to use.

A new Straighten tool has one purpose: to make horizontal lines truly horizontal. Trace over a horizon in the image and it will be automatically straightened. It's a straightforward process, but with an added twist: you can set the image to crop automatically after rotation - maintaining the original aspect ratio if you want - so no further work will be required after straightening. This isn't the equivalent of Photoshop's Perspective Crop, but a simple and straightforward tool that does its job with no fuss.

Adobe has also upgraded Elements' Crop tool, with the option of maintaining the aspect ratio of the original image. A new twist is the Reverse Aspect Ratio option, which will allow you to crop a landscape photograph to a portrait shape, effectively rotating the aspect ratio by 90 to ensure consistent print size.

Elements 4 has now ditched the File Browser in favour of Adobe Bridge, the standalone image management application that first appeared with the Adobe CS2 suite. It's a far more powerful solution, allowing you to view, manipulate and order Jpegs, Camera Raw and PDF files. As well as handling files on hard disks, it's also capable of viewing and importing files directly from a digital camera: the ability to bypass a camera's proprietary software means more control and greater flexibility.

Bridge enables you to create full-screen slide shows, add captions to photos, and assign and find files using keywords. Meanwhile, smart search filters make it a breeze to create collections of images, and you can also search by metadata within captured files.

Adobe has added Camera Raw support throughout Elements, which now includes support for saving and working with Digital Negative (DNG) files. This enables you to work with, edit and manipulate files, safe in the knowledge that the original remains permanently accessible.

Among the interface tweaks is a font menu that displays fonts in their own typeface for greater ease of selection. Furthermore, as with Photoshop CS2, you can now select multiple layers in Elements by holding down the shift key as you click on additional layers with the Move tool. There's also a version of CS2's Noise Reduction filter, which removes both artifacts and colour noise from digital images captured at high ISO ratings, not to mention an enhanced Print dialog that allows custom placement of images to make the most economical use of photographic paper stock on inkjet printers.

The emphasis in Elements 4 is all about ease of use. Previously complex tasks, such as adjusting skin tones and making selections from complex backgrounds, have been greatly simplified through the use of intelligent dialogs and sophisticated image processing. Much has been done to hide the complexity of the operations from the user, leaving you with a straightforward set of dialogs that are both easy to use and remarkably effective.

Elements 4 is a huge improvement on what was already a hugely sophisticated application. It's still not a professional prepress tool - there's no CMYK support, no Curves adjustment, no layer masks and no Pen tool or path support - but it was never intended for use in a professional environment. As a home user's image processing application, Elements remains unbeatable - and this latest version is better than ever. At a fraction of the cost of the full-blown version of Photoshop CS2, it represents outstanding value for money.