Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 review

Two other major enhancements have been ported down from the latest Photoshop CS4. First up is the new Exposure mode for Photo Merge. If you've taken multiple bracketed shots, this automatically analyses all images and combines them together to produce a "best-of" shot. In manual mode, it can also be used to combine flash-on foregrounds and flash-off backgrounds.

Even more impressive is the new Recompose command. This lets you resize an image, leaving the foreground subjects undistorted, while unwanted background areas are automatically and seamlessly removed. This might sound like another great idea on paper doomed to fail in the real world, but it works brilliantly, providing real-time cropping with an built-in sense of aesthetics.

This is serious power but, if all you want to do is tweak an image, the Editor's Full Edit mode is overkill. This is where Quick Edit mode comes into play. Here, the major change is the introduction of preview variations. Click on the variations icon by each Quick Fix slider and a grid of nine thumbnail previews drops down to show how different slider settings would affect the image. Enabling the end user to simply pick between onscreen choices such as this sounds great, but in practice proves far more complicated than finding the best setting by simply dragging the slider.

This is typical of Photoshop Elements 8 as a whole. Adobe tries everything it can to make life easier for the end user by offloading work onto the computer but, more often than not, the attempts backfire and end up wasting time. Adobe would do well to learn from the simpler, more streamlined approach offered by both Corel Digital Studio 2010 and Google Picasa 3.

It's a shame, because Photoshop Elements 8's editing tools are second to none at this price, and the new additions extend its lead as the most powerful photo-manipulation software among its peers. It clings on to its A List position for those reasons, but only just.

Author: Tom Arah