Product Reviews

Adobe Photoshop has dominated the world of photo editing since its first release and is undoubtedly the best choice for professionals. But what about the average user just looking to edit and control their digital camera images? For these users, Photoshop is too technical, too powerful and too expensive. The obvious solution would be to adapt Photoshop to produce a dedicated mid-range solution, which is exactly what Adobe has tried to do with Photoshop Elements 2.

For Elements to be successful, it needs to be more accessible than its big brother. The emphasis on providing assistance to hand is clear when you first load the application. A context-sensitive Hints palette gives feedback as you move your cursor over tools. The Recipes palette provides step-by-step guidance for common tasks. And there's a new Help Search field embedded in the main toolbar. Sadly, the Hints panel adds little that comprehensive ToolTips couldn't have done better, the selection of Recipes is still meagre, and the online help system expects too much technical knowledge.

If you want a simple package look elsewhere, but if you're looking for power Elements has more to offer. In a way, Elements has an unfair advantage here and, as you'd expect, version 2 sees a number of features imported from its big brother. The two selling points in the recent Photoshop 7 were the visual file management and advanced brush handling offered through the File Browser and Brushes palettes, and I expected this to be the case for Elements too. In fact, the File Browser was first introduced in version 1 of Elements, so this improved implementation represents much less of an advance than it did for Photoshop.

The new support for EXIF data and the ability to batch rename files, on the other hand, are welcome improvements. Surprisingly, the Brushes palette hasn't been imported at all, but this isn't as bad as it first appears. Although Elements doesn't offer the phenomenal brush control provided by Photoshop 7, it does have a full range of presets as 11 brush libraries ranging from Calligraphic through to Wet Media. Elements 2 doesn't offer the headline features of Photoshop 7 nor others such as the Healing brush, but there are several other improvements

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targeted at the PC photographer that have made the transition.

The updated Create Web Photos Gallery command now offers 14 styles of output. Much more significant is the revamped Picture Package command, which now provides a print preview and the ability to output different images on the same page. It's a big step forward, even though the macro-based nature of both these commands is still clunky.

That's just about it for power imported from the latest Photoshop, but Elements 2 also offers its own range of expanded functionality for the PC photographer. The Attach to Email command makes it simple to send any open image, which can be automatically resized and optimised as required.

Alternatively, you can combine multiple images into a slide show ready for sending. The slide show is created as a PDF and so can be viewed by anyone with Acrobat Reader. Personally, I'd have preferred the ability to present slide shows on the fly from within Elements. If you have a digital camcorder, you can also use the new Import Frame from Video command to select an individual frame from any video format supported by Windows Media.

Photoshop Elements' PC photography features are workable compared to more modern, dedicated packages such as MGI PhotoSuite. Elements clearly has the advantage in terms of core editing power. There has been some minor reworking here, rather than a major overhaul; there's one new tool - the Selection Brush tool - which lets you interactively paint onto your image to create a selection for copying, cutting or masking.

In terms of colour correction, the focus is on getting good results quickly rather than on high-end features such as Photoshop's Curves and Channel Mixer commands. In addition to the one-click Auto Levels, Auto Contrast and Auto Colour commands, there's a new Quick Fix command that offers fast access to adjustments under the Brightness, Colour Correction, Focus and Rotate categories. The Variations command has also been revamped with smaller thumbnails but larger Before and After previews to help you visually hone in on the desired effect.

Overall, it's difficult to get too excited about this latest release of Elements as the new additions are all relatively minor and there's certainly little for existing users to envy. However, if you don't already have a photo editor, Elements is a more attractive proposition. There might be little that's new, but Photoshop's great strengths - such as its layer-based photo compositing, artistic filters, adjustment layers, history states, vector shapes, text handling and excellent Web optimisation - have all been built up over its long history. Finally, Photoshop Elements' great selling point is simply that it offers access to the vast majority of its big brother's power at comparatively little cost.