Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 offers the perfect combination of power and simplicity, letting you do more with your photos. Be creative and easily share your photos as prints, by e-mail, or on the Web. Quickly correct red eye and exposure, automatically straighten and crop, or stitch multiple photos into seamless panoramas.

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.

Format

Macintosh and Windows

Features

• Learn and grow with Photoshop Elements 2.0 through Inspirational Recipes and Smart Messages
• Batch processing and enhanced file browser allow Time-Saving File Management
• Take Digital Photos further - new Quick Fix dialog and the Frame from Video dialog allow the extraction of still photographs from video files
• Add artistic touches to images with redesigned Brushes and new Selection Brush
• Create PDF slideshows or a Web Photo Gallery to share the fun with family and friends

Amazon.com Review

For intermediate digital image enthusiasts who don't need Adobe Photoshop, Adobe's barer-bones Photoshop Elements 2.0 works atop the same engine and provides many of the same tools for a fraction of the price.

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

Amazon.co.uk Review

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 sits between the low-end PhotoDeluxe and the professional Photoshop 7.0, and is ideal for anyone with a serious interest in digital imaging. It offers particularly good handholding features for beginners.

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