Horribly busy but will catch up on my review reading - promise!
Horribly busy but will catch up on my review reading - promise!
Member since:22.10.2006
Reviews:90
Members who trust:18
AdobePhotoshop Elements 4 aims to be everything the photographer wants for tweaking and fixing their images. Whilst the professionals prefer its more expensive big brother Photoshop CS, Photoshop Elements isn't to be sniffed at and offers 80% of the power for 10% of the price whilst making many tasks much easier.
The biggest surprise coming from version 3 is that the file browser has gone. Adobe, what are you thinking? Well, it's clear what they're thinking, they want you to use the Photoshop Album interface which merged in to Photoshop Elements with version 3. It's actually a very powerful interface and lets you
import and catalogue your images with ease and flexibility but sometimes, you just want to get down and dirty with the file system and the loss of a file browser hurts. As a sort of apology, Adobe have added the ability to browse what it calls unmanaged folders to replace the file browsers functionality but it's not the same. That said, it's also about the only down side in Photoshop Elements 4. The album interface also allows you to quickly find faces in images allowing for quicker tagging, remove red-eye on import and other fancy tricks.
Call me sad, but having been raised on the BBC's Blue Peter TV program, I'm a sucker for those 'films' which are created by moving a camera over a still image to help a story flow. You can now create pan and zoom effects as part of a slide show and great fun they are too.
It's a Kind of Magic
More seriously, the rather wonderful Magic Selection Brush can save a huge amount of time if you're trying to make a selection of part of an image. Whilst it is better suited to well defined areas, it still does a very impressive job in most cases getting you off to a good start, often needing only minor tweaking to get a well defined selection. Also new is the Magic Extractor which allows you to draw over bits you want to keep, draw bits you want to lose and then automatically knock out the background leaving just the part(s) you want. As with the Magic Selector Brush, this worked most of the time and when it does, it puts a smile on your face.
A much lauded new tool is the adjust colour for skin tone feature. This in theory optimises an images colour balance for the skin tones, arguably the most crucial part of an images quality. In many cases this did indeed provide a quick one click fix but I did find a few images came off much worse. Still, no hardship clicking on undo in those cases.
Going Straight
It was always reasonably easy to straighten an image but now that function has a dedicated tool which optionally resizes as needed and even crops the rotated image to get rid of the nasty bits around the edge.
Searching
Another new feature I particularly liked is the ability to search the metadata allowing you to search the data buried in the images themselves. You could for instance search for images taken with a focal length of 100mm or faster than 300th of a second. The Organizer now recognizes DNG (Adobe Digital Negative) format files too and there are additional media types you can select when searching.
Bits and bobs
The rest of the changes include numerous tweaks to almost every function. There is better but still basic 16bit support. The noise reduction filter now has an option to help with JPG artefacts and layers are a little easier to work with.
Compared to version 3 I found version 4 needed quite a powerful PC to get the best out of it. It seemed to suffer particularly on systems with slow hard drives such as laptops. However, once it was up and running, it was snappy enough. It was only changing from one editing mode to another that seemed to hit it hard after that.
Conclusion
Version 3 was a huge jump over version 2. Version 4 is a more subtle change but still adds plenty of useful features. For many, the improved selection tools may swing it. For others, the improvements to the slideshow may be just what you're after. If you're still on version 1 or 2 or don't have it at all, Adobe Elements 4 is in my opinion a must have for photographers and other image manipulators.
rey - forgot to add, if you're interested in photography, check out my review of iView Media Pro 2.5.
ilaskey 11.02.2007 15:07
rey - I don't see how me leaving before/after photos to prove to you I use the package should have any bearing on the rating. The review is either good or it isn't as it stands. If you feel it is only worth a helpful then that's your perogative. In all honesty, I don't have that much free time to spend on really fiddling with photos so 99% of my use of this package is quickly balancing the light/contrast and sharpening on images prior to sending off to stock agencies. I wish I had time to mess about more with them. I'm currently reading a book on Elements lighting techniques that is whetting my apatite somewhat!
Advantages: Fairly easy to use, and has all the features your likely to need for photo editing. Included tutorials. Technical Support. Disadvantages: It doesn't always work first time! It isn't wildly fast unless you have a very powerful PC. Closing and saving files is a bit torturous.
Advantages: Fairly easy to use, and has all the features your likely to need for photo editing. Included tutorials. Technical Support. Disadvantages: It doesn't always work first time! It isn't wildly fast unless you have a very powerful PC. Closing and saving files is a bit torturous.
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