Home > Consumer Reviews > Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0

I highly advised if your not experience with the program you might want to take a class on it or buy newer versions of this Adobe product. It does not ask for you to backup your orignal file before editing. I high recommend making a backup of your photo file before making changes to the Photo.

I bought this program to run on Windows XP and below for my own evaluation.

I got this program bundled with a pen tablet and thought "Cool, an upgrade to my PhotoDeluxe". I immediately installed it and used it for about a minute before it crashed. I did a bunch of internet searches (including Adobe's site) to find out if anyone else experienced this...nothing.

Fast forward about six months: I decided to open the program once again and narrowed down the problem to the "eyedropper" or the "color picker". After checking the help menu, there is a tiny paragraph tucked away that says something like "If you're using a Windows machine, change the default Adobe "color picker" to the Windows "color picker". Sure enough, the Abobe color picker was causing the program to crash on my WinXP machine! Seems to me, that there should have been a note somewhere on the outside of the CD warning about this, considering Windows machines are used by at least 80% of the world.

Then...it also took me forever to figure out how to go about outlining objects/selections. Instead of keeping the name "Outline" (like in PhotoDeluxe), Elements changed it to "Stroke" and took it out of the effects list (it's now banished to one of the other drop down menus). Why?

Other than that, it's a great upgrade to PhotoDeluxe that includes a GIF animation maker, a "liquifier" effect (same thing as Kai's "Goo") and tons of other stuff you'll probably never use.

I bought Photoshop Elements about a year ago, after running Adobe PhotoDelux for years. I tried it and did not like it at all. It's much more complex than PhotoDelux and required different commands to do the same operations. I did not want to learn a new photo software editing package. So I stopped using it about a year ago. However, a month ago, I got a new computer (2.8Ghz) running WinXP; unfortunately, XP will NOT run PhotoDelux and Adobe no longer supports it. So I was forced to get out the Photoshop Elements and loaded it on the XP machine. Now I have to learn photo editing all over again. The software runs much faster, which takes some of the pain out of the process, but it is hard to do things that were simple in PhotoDelux. They changed all the keyboard shortcuts (WHY, WHY, WHY did they have to do that??!!!). Some tasks no longer have shortcuts at all and tasks that were one keystroke with PhotoDelux now take many mouse clicks. Some tasks that PhotoDelux did easily, Photoshop Elements does not do at all. For example, it places no free space gutter around pictures, which makes it hard to work on large blow up images at the pixel level. Does not do drop shadows with the shadow as an adjustable layer like PhotoDelux. The list goes on and on. If I had it to do again, I'd probably go with some other software, since I'm having to learn photo editing all over again anyway.

Got this program when it was first out when there was a special deal locally. I figured for [$$]it was worth a try.

I use it OFTEN and REALLY LIKE the feature that let's you save an image for the Web. It's saved me much grief and lots of hassles.

Unfortunately the help on the program stopped working and a fresh installation didn't fix the problem. Now the crop box no longer follows the cursor. (NO, I don't have a virus present.)

I'm hoping that if I update the V 2.X these problems will disappear but not counting on it.

I recommend this program if you want some reasonable power and ease of use.

Photoshop Elements was specifically designed to help you create high-quality web graphics. Although its environment looks a lot like Photoshop and it has many of Photoshop's same powerful features, Elements is easier to learn and use. Before Elements, I used PaintShop Pro v. 7 and was very satisfied with it. However, Photoshop Elements has become my program of choice. Most of Adobe's products are well worth the investment...this one is no exception. If you're designing any graphics for use on the web, you'll be pleased with this program.