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1. 

   Iphigenie says:

   I’ve used Photoshop since Version 5 and currently use CS4. I’ve also been using Elements for maybe 5 years or more. For everyday family and landscape pix, Elements has been my editor of choice. But then Picasa came along and I found that I could do maybe 60 per cent of my photo handling more easily and quickly in Picasa, particularly since version 3. And the price is right. I nevertheless paid the bucks for Elements 8 because Picasa has its limits; when you need to apply operations to selected parts of a photo, you need Elements or the full PS. But Elements also has its limits: when you need to work on a lot of photos, it’s a pain. Here’s my first impressions.

   The first thing you see when you bring up Elements 8 is a dialog with a choice between Organize and Edit. Wrong, wrong, wrong. When I have a batch of photos to process, Organize is Edit, and Edit is Organize. I need to switch back and forth between editing and organizing dozens of times and it needs to happen like in the blink of an eye. That’s where Picasa shines — one integrated edit-and-organize program, back and forth cleanly with a click. In Elements 8, if you start with Organize and pick a photo you want to edit, you have to wait a good l-o-n-g time (on a 2GB memory system running Windows RC7) for the editor to load in the background. And if when the editor finally comes up you decide the photo isn’t worth editing, and you want to go back to Organizer and look at the next one, it locks the image on you with a red bar, “Edit in Progress.” I’m still trying to figure out a way to unlock it. When you’re in edit mode, your other pictures show in a horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen. Switching between Organize and Edit, even after the editor finally loads in memory, is not as clean and smooth as in Picasa3.

   On the good side, there is one view in Organizer (hard to find — you need to click on Fix without selecting an item from the dropdown) where you can select multiple photos and apply basic fixes to the set, such as levels and sharpen. That’s an advance over Picasa and represents the kind of blending of editing and organizing that will get me to stick with a program. If that hybrid workspace were the sweet spot of the program I’d rate it as well worth the money. Unfortunately when you need to move up from the few basic fixes, you’re back in the lo-o-n-g “loading editor workspace” wait.

   Apart from the substandard integration of editing and organizing — the very core of what a volume photo handling tool needs to do — the Elements editor remains the very useful and productive single-image editor that it has been for years, and it’s improved. There’s a new “recompose” tool that Stalin’s darkroom people would have loved back in the day for editing Trotsky out of those Red Square group portraits; now anyone can do it easily. There’s a blend tool that superimposes two badly lit shots to create one good one; I haven’t tried it. The crop tool is improved with optional aspect ratio choices. There’s a new “cookie cutter” tool that lets you cut out, for example, heart-shaped segments of a photo. The action of the zoom tool has been upgraded to zoom to the point where you click, a welcome improvement. The spot healing tool continues to improve for fixing zits on faces. Speaking of faces, 8 has the “face recognition” tool-du-jour that shows me what a face is in case I can’t figure it out myself. For example, 8′s Analytics told me that a tight macro of a bin of beans was a “long shot with one face.” The Analytics tool is pretty useless; if any part of a photo is in focus, even a tree in the background, it’ll tell you the whole pic is in focus even though the faces in the foreground are a foggy blur.

   Given my unhappiness with the integration of Edit and Organize, I’m probably not going to turn my disk full of 23,000 images over to the Elements Organizer tool; it’ll stay in Picasa3. The online backup I already have. I’ll dump the Organizer and just use Elements 8 as the intermediate-advanced single image editing tool that it’s been for years. As that, it’s improved and for projects where I don’t need the full CS4 capabilities, it’s a good tool and, I guess, worth the money. Two cheers. Maybe Elements 9 will do the edit-organize integration as well as Picasa3, or maybe Picasa4 will become as good an editor as Elements. We’ll see.

   March 1, 2010, 6:50 pm
2. 

   Jag says:

   Ok, let’s start with the top question: Do you or I really need another upgrade of Photoshop Elements? Is it vastly different than (6.0 or 7.0) and should this be my digital photo editing and organizing software of choice? I will cover the main points of the changes from Version 6.0 and 7.0 in this review. I have also reviewed Photoshop Premiere Elements 8 which is the video editor, and comes as a package option with Photoshop Elements 8.

   Photoshop Elements has two components– an editor, where you do your digital picture manipulation, and a file organizer or album where you store and retrieve your images. The interface for the editor is the same whether or not you use Mac or Windows, so if you are switching from one OS (say, MAC’s at school, Windows at home) you will be very comfortable with Photoshop Elements. Where the systems differ, however, is in the file organizer and this is understandable; the Organizer function involves organizing and retrieving files, so this is going to be different depending on your computer operating system.

   Since I don’t have access to a MAC, and since I don’t know much about them, I’m going to be reviewing the Windows version only from here on in this review. For your information, I’m currently using Windows Vista 64 Home Premium Edition.

   My computer system used for this test is an HP Pavilion with an AMD Athlon 64X2 2.70 Dual Core CPU 5200+. I have 4 GB of RAM. The Video card is NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 wtih 128 MB of video memory. This is an on-board video card (on the motherboard) and if you are doing heavy image work, and video, you might want a separate, more capable video card.

   Minimum PC Requirements:

   Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7
   1.6GHz or faster processor
   1GB RAM (MINIMUM means MINIMUM; you really will need 2GB of ram to be comfy)
   2GB available hard disk space
   Microsoft DirectX 9
   Color monitor with 16-bit color video card
   Internet Access for online features and help

   One immediate, small but great change from Version 7.0 is that when the software is initially booted up, the Welcome Screen is rearranged; on the left side: simple buttons EDIT or ORGANIZE. On the right, access to tutorials and underneath, info on your Photoshop online account (space available, links to your personal URL and online organizer.) Version 7.0 had tab buttons along the top of the welcome screen and was visually more confusing. THIS IS A GREAT IMPROVEMENT. THANK YOU.

   A big change from Version 6.0 is the workspace, which is now dark gray in color (I actually don’t like this–the gray is depressing, but I understand visually it is far less distracting and lets you focus on your editing job.) The workspace is now adjustable. However, if you are a change-o-phobic or just habit-bound, you can return the settings to look and feel like previous versions, for example, the fixed-window workspace of Version 6.0 can be retrieved in the Application Frame in the preferences window. There are other big changes, mainly the organizer, the online content, the personal online space and some editing tools; more about these further on in this review.

   In addition to the change to the Welcome Screen, there are changes to the interface where you access your tools. The palettes have been renamed as “panels” so I got confused a bit again. I’ve been using Palettes for years with editing software; palettes of filters, layers, colors. So, now, they are PANELS, and you can do this right in the panel itself at the bottom. This is also a significant change from Version 6.0 (7.0 does have it.) The big change to 7.0 however, is that the layer controls are now their own panel below the Layers panel. The old dialog boxes are being replaced by these drop-down panels. <

   March 1, 2010, 11:08 pm

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