I'd recently bought a new digital camera and was taking lots of pictures so wanted an easy to use package that would catalog my files and also let me edit them, so I purchased Adobe Photshop Elements 4.0.

Elements did not come with any printed manuals only a cd, which contained installation instructions, e-books, websites and tools. The help system was very good, similar to Microsoft's MSDN, it's very thorough.

The program itself takes a little while to start, but once it's started all operations seem reasonably quick on my Dell Laptop. In edit mode applying filters takes hardly any time.

The interface is very easy to use, there are 3 main windows, the catalog, quick edit mode and standard edit mode. When you first start Elements up it asks you where to look for photo files, once this has been set it searches that location and displays all the pictures found in the catalog window. The catalog window gives you lots of different ways for organizing the files on your computer, most of these leave the files where they are but allows you to tag them. You can tag pictures with people's name s who are in them, the place, or event. These tags then allow you to filter your photos by person or by event etc. There si a very useful feature for tagging people and that's the Face Finder, it will find all the faces in your pictures so you can quick and easily tag them, although it only works if you have correctly orientated your photos so that the face are the right way. From the catalog window you can also create slideshows, calendars, DVDs etc.

In Standard Edit mode, you get the same functionaluty as Quick Edit, but with a lot more manual options. To use the Standard Edit mode you do need to know what you're doing a bit more as this is like a slighlty cutdown version of Photoshop CS. There is a lot of things you can do in Standard Edit, there are lots of filters to play with, you can change levels, colour, lighting fix blemishes on skin, remove wrinkles plus many, many more. These additional features are where the e-books on the cd come in handy giving you lots of information on how to use the software to its best.

For cataloging and editing your digital photos this is a great program. There are so many features to explore that you will be amazed at how good your pictures can look after using this program. I highly recommend it.