Adobe Photoshop Elements 8

The low-cost powerful image-editing package

Having prevailed as the software package for budding digital photographers since its initial launch in 2001, Photoshop Elements has undergone innumerable changes over the years, resulting in the honed, sophisticated image editor that we’re featuring in this review.

Photoshop Elements 8 boasts a number of new innovative features in addition to some of the tried-and-tested options that users of its previous incarnation benefited from. One of the potentially most useful time-saving features is the software’s ability to analyse your images and organise them according to their perceived level of quality (low, medium or high), using criteria such as whether they’re in focus or blurred, contrast, exposure and so on. While this is undoubtedly going to cut down on the amount of time you spend on trawling through hundreds of shots of the same subject, cataloguing and rating each in turn, it does remove the human aspect of selecting the best shots; after all, it’s not always technical perfection that produces the best images.

Expanding this feature further, Elements 8 is equipped with a face recognition feature that attempts to locate and tag subjects automatically – potentially a handy tool for social and portrait photographers in particular. Once the program has finished searching through your images for faces that it thinks match the ones you’ve already tagged, it asks you to check its selections and approve or reject them. We found it to work best for well-lit subjects that are squarely facing the camera, but not at all for subjects that aren’t perfectly exposed or directly looking at the photographer. There’s still some room for improvement, which hopefully the powers that be at Adobe will have realised.
Additional enhancements include a Quick Edit panel that’s now available in Full Screen mode, which lets you make a few basic tweaks to your images without having to load the main editor, but anything more advanced than a quick rotation and crop will require you to do so.

Adjust Smart Fix: In addition to the simple Smart Fix option, users can take a little more control over the amount of editing applied to their images using a slider, while a live preview is displayed in the background

The latest version of Elements offers more powerful editing options than ever before, including adjustment layers that are accessed via a panel that’s reminiscent of the ‘full fat’ Photoshop CS4 program. Also borrowed from CS4 is a new option under the Photo Merge tool: Exposure Mode. This involves the program automatically scanning your bracketing images, picking out the best ones and merging them together for the optimum image. This is great for high-contrast images or shots where you want to combine a flash-lit foreground subject with ambient lighting in the background. The program does a pretty good job of matching up layers, even if you have shifted slightly when taking multiple shots; however, if it does not get it quite right or you want to take matters into your own hands, you have the option to align them manually.

All of the key tools Elements 7 users benefited from are still here with new templates and projects are to be found in the Create tab

Another exciting option is the Recompose tool, which lets you crop out messy objects or big gaps in the frame without affecting your subjects themselves. For example, take a group shot where everyone is standing close together except one straggler that’s a few paces to one side, then bring them into the group by eliminating that gap for a better composed group shot or – if you prefer – remove them entirely, without leaving a trace in your final image. This feature produces brilliant results for the most part, but we did notice a bit of distortion in some of our recomposed shots, particularly those that involved subjects closer to the camera and images that required larger chunks to be removed.
Adjustment Previews are another worthwhile addition to Elements 8’s feature set, allowing you to check the effect of tweaks you want to perform in the Quick Edit tab. You get to preview full-size images that demonstrate potential changes before picking the one that you want to execute – a quick way of applying a range of edits and a handy learning tool at the same time.

The new interface, editing tools and templates that Elements 8 offers make for a powerful program that developing photography enthusiasts will love.