Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 [OLD VERSION]
by Adobe

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Software Summary

• Image editing software

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Software Reviews of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 [OLD VERSION]

Customer Review: Visualize Whirled Peas, and Add Dropshadow
Summary: 4 Stars

And, like most people who know something good when they see it (rather than having the ability to describe it taxonomically), I have no ability to actually make a good web site myself...Instead, we'll get into something that's been one of my main bugaboos for a long time - the ability to make pictures and text look good. That's not the same as composing an overall page, but we're talking baby steps here.

And by "looking good" I don't mean, necessarily, a picture with good content or composition, or well-written text. I mean a picture or text that looks good; something that tickles the senses... Y'know, like with a small, stylistic border, or vignette fading around the edges, or a drop shadow careening off the bottom right corner. I'm talking about stuff that your digital camera won't do. And, until not so long ago, your economically attainable drawing program wouldn't do it either.

PhotoShop Elements, a sort of subset program of the big...PhotoShop program, seems to me like it was made for amateur web designers. And whaddaya know - the Adobe web page says that's its purpose. It comes with the tools a person needs to add that extra bit of visual sweetness to a picture or 3-D beveled euphony to a group of words that really makes the image or text sing for the site. Assuming one has the talent to make a site at all, that is.

PhotoShop Elements comes with the tools that some of the truncated Adobe programs included in a digital camera's shrink wrap generally provide. This would include auto-adjustment of hue, contrast and brightness, straightening, rotation, color and background filters, black and white or negative switching, cropping - need I go on? What does one generally want to do with a raw photograph? Elements does that just fine, and adds things not found on the spare product that came with your camera: tools such as "dodge, burn and sponge" can be applied to specific areas of the photo to create the effect you need.

But my fun with Elements starts when I commence with the special effects. Like, for instance, 3-D Text-beveling, in various styles. Start with a blank slate, pick a font, type a few words, and start playing with it. Change its color. Add drop shadows, which, like people, come in different depths, intensities and degrees of coarseness. Add inner glows. Outer glows. Chunk in some background scenes, in the text itself or behind it. The text or picture can be bent, distorted, exaggerated, minimized, corrupted and bowdlerized. It's there for you to put into your web page.

The tools to do these things are found, mostly, in the Layer Styles tab on the top of your Elements window. Well, OK, not all the tools are there - but let me suggest Layer Styles as a place to start playing. Once you learn what a layer is - and thankfully, they don't complicate the learning process by assuming you already know all this - you can work on each layer and then pile 'em on each other.

And you all know that digital or scanned pictures don't always come out very well, and they're difficult to change without decent tools. This software is seriously capable of dealing with such intransigence, and you don't have to guess what color would look better for Aunt Prudence's pasty face. PhotoShop Elements will, at your behest, automatically create several color-adjusted versions of your image. Prudence might not look right with a Cayman Islands tan, but she might look better with a little glow in her cheeks. And what about that blemish on your neck? Mmm-mm, it's no good letting the spouse speculate about that... Touch the little sucker up. No pun intended.

If you're wondering about all those insidious little icons on your screen, drop down the Hints tab into its own little window and let it explain them to you as you pass your mouse over each icon. If you're wondering about how to make that text look like carved relief in marble, drop down the Recipes tab to find out how to do all sorts of wonderful things to text or pictures with step-by-step explanations. The Effects tab provides pre-designed manipulations that can be applied to either text or pictures. And, the good ol' Layer Styles tab has all those cool bevels, glows and inner or outer drop shadows. I love Layer Styles.

The best thing about PhotoShop Elements is its price...you can get a program that will let a web designer do all the things he's always wanted to do with his text and pictures - because that's how he saw them done on the really good web sites.

And we know a good web site when we see one, don't we.

Description of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 [OLD VERSION]

Elements' interface is less complex then Photoshop, packaging oft-used quick correction tools in easy-to-access locations. The program gears itself toward the novice user looking to learn more about digital image modification and enhancement. You can also enter keywords into a search field and Elements will offer up related walkthroughs and instructions.

Elements can input images from a variety of sources, including scanners and digital cameras. It's more powerful than the average program bundled with any of these devices, so you can make it your default image editor for either or both. Stills can also be snagged from a variety of video formats, including QuickTime, MPEG, AVI, and Windows Media. Before opening images, you can browse through their thumbnails, which include a preview of the image as well as its size and type.

Inputted images can be enhanced, distorted, corrected, or combined into panoramas through the PhotoMerge stitching tool. The new Selection Brush lets users simply paint over an item they would like to cut or copy. While it still takes a steady hand to select non-straight edges, it's easier than using the standard selection tools such as the rectangular marquee or the lasso. Elements works well as a file manager as well, its new batch processing feature allowing users to make changes to several images at once.

Output options are also expansive, including attaching photos to e-mail messages, printing images, or saving them in a smaller Web format and then uploading them to the Internet. Beyond these typical tools, Elements users can create image slideshows in PDF format that can be viewed on PDAs as well as other PCs.

While there are other image editing programs that sell for the same price, Photoshop Elements brings to the table much of the power of its bigger sibling while making it accessible for the average user. --J. Curtis

With Photoshop Elements, Adobe takes the most widely used parts of Photoshop and tweaks the interface to make these features easier to use. The program is designed mainly for retouching digital photographs, but has a number of natural media brushes, too, so you can create your own images from scratch.

The key features of Elements revolve around the amount of assistance offered and the friendly interface. While there are many more tools available than in, say, PhotoDeluxe, the comprehensive Help system and the Recipe Palette work together to provide an easy entrance into common tasks. These include retouching images, preparing them as Web graphics, and sending pictures as e-mail attachments.

New additions to this version start as soon as you choose to open a graphic file. The file browser now shows thumbnails of all readable files and provides details of their types and sizes. To open the file, simply double-click a thumbnail.

The Palette Well is a box, set into the Shortcuts bar, that contains five separate, tabbed palettes, for options such as filters and layers. Click on any tab and the palette detaches to float over the work area; click again and it re-docks in the well.

Photoshop Elements now provides an image stitching tool called Photomerge, and a method for grabbing single frames from common video types, such as MPEG, AVI, WMV, and QuickTime. Improved features for creating Web images include the ability to create Web galleries of your photos and automated adjustments, which can be used to make photos suitable for Web transmission and display.

Photoshop Elements 2.0 is ideal for the enthusiastic amateur or base-level professional graphic artist who needs to work quickly and easily with photographic images. --Simon Williams

Innovative Help features get you up to speed quickly. Hints provide illustrations and tips on how to use each editing tool. Smart Messages offer links from confusing terms in error messages to clear explanations in the glossary. Any time you have a question, simply type a word in the Help Search field to receive the information you need.

Inspirational Recipes describe how to apply special effects and perform a variety of editing techniques. Add frames, edges, and amazingly realistic paintbrush effects. Create Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) slide shows to share with anyone on almost any device. Whether you use a digital camera or a scanner, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 makes digital imaging a breeze.

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