Home > Consumer Reviews > Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0

At this writing, two products, Adobe Photoshop Elements and Paintshop Pro, are far more powerful than anything else in their price class. Power is the reason for buying Photoshot Elements, and not the Help facility nor the documentation. Indeed, the documentation is on the level of "Click this and drag that." Wouldn't it be nice if they told you why you want to do any of the things they are describing? Fortunately third party documentation abounds. Documentation aside, if you have a digital camera, you will need this product or something close. Let me justify that remark.

With digital photography, images are cheap, and they are editable; with standard recreational (non-darkroom) photography, they are expensive and immutable. Thus, digital photography is to recreational photography as word processing is to typing. You don't throw out underexposed shots anymore; you brighten them. The shot doesn't work? Maybe part of it does. Maybe several parts do by themselves. To get all the juice out of this emerging technology, one requires sophisticated software. Adobe Photoshop Elements is such software. It isn't the simplest to use - precisely because it's worth using.

Here's an example of what the product can do. My wife is Chinese. Her parents just now came to Pittsburgh for a visit. Naturally, we felt compelled to drag them through museums. I snapped two shots of wife, inlaws, and our four-year-old boy in front of a huge T-Rex. The vast room absorbed most of the flash, as I knew it would. My four-year-old was hard to control, and the inlaws, who speak no English, weren't sure when to pose. In the first shot, my son was the only one looking at the camera. In the second, he was the only one looking away.

With Photoshop Elements, I supplied extra fill flash - not only in general, but to specific, extra dark spots. The effort saved the T-Rex from another extinction. Then (I shudder to confess�) I pasted the kid's head from the first photo onto his body in the second. The resulting composition is seamless. It couldn't have been accomplished with a dumbed-down package, and I would have passed up the big room shot altogether with a non-digital camera. Very well, it's diabolical. Just don't tell my sister-in-law, who is, at this moment, admiring the result on her computer in Cheng Du.

After a free 30 day download from Adobe I was convinced that Elements gave me all the flexibility to create what I was never able to do in a darkroom.When I purchased a digital camera it came with Photoshop 5.5 Limited Edition (a teaser so you want more) Elements gave me all I wanted and more, more than I could ever do with film and chemicals and I don't have to turn off the lights to do it.Thank you Adobe for making a retired photographer HAPPY again.

I've been using the 30 day free trial version for around a week now, and as a relative newcomer to digital imaging am finding this product very straightforward and intuitive to use. Will certainly be buying when the trial runs out. ****1/2

As Adobe's replacement to Photoshop LE 5.0, Elements has some good points and some not so good. On the plus side the most useful improvements are the inclusion of a multi- step redo feature via Window > Show History; and the selected-tool option bar, which makes for less clicking to be gone through whenever you wish to change a tool's attributes - similar to Photoshop 6.0. The downside with this application is that, unlike LE 5.0, Elements needs a pretty hefty computer to run. I loaded it onto a P90 running NT 4.0 and found the application to very, very slow in comparison to LE 5.0, which runs well on such an old machine. At least a 400 MHz machine would be needed to get rapid results. Many of the more useful image level adjustments are not too easily found, with much too much emphasis being given over to preset options where the more useful ones would normally reside. This is inconsistent with Photoshop LE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0 and prejudices the notion that Elements is a learning gateway to the bigger application.

My feeling is that adding the multi-step redo feature to LE 5.0 would have been quite sufficient for a product at this price point.

Adobe have tried hard with Elements to make it more accessible to non-technical types, but the way in which they have gone about this is to make it appear that the application is not as comprehensive as it is by dumbing things down and hiding the important features.

Nevertheless it's all there, and remarkable value for the price, which, with some determination on the user's part, will provide a rewarding means of manipulating their images.

I think Photoshop Elements is great! It is a very powerful, user friendly image editing program. It can turn bad digital photos into great photos, manipulate them, clone sections of pictures (great for making web page banners) and add text to them (the text feature in itself is one of the best I've seen). The "recipes" can make a somewhat daunting task very easy.
It puts lots of Photoshop features into an easy to use and affordable package for the average user.