Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0

Don Bradbury reviews the latest version of Adobe's "essentials" digital image editing software

Product	Photoshop Elements 3
Company	Adobe
Web	www.adobe.co.uk
Price	£77
We like	Features, price
We don't like	Brief manual
Rating	9/10
Requirements

Adobe, famous for their gargantuan and complex but hugely powerful industry standard photo editing software, now called Photoshop CS, have not been slow to realize the potential of their far slicker "Elements" version. Not only a great deal cheaper at just £77 compared with CS's £500 or so, Elements has become an increasingly comfortable home for some of CS's more interesting and powerful features to tempt potential users away from the likes of rival Paint Shop Pro.

And it's not just an editing package, either; Elements has a file browser/organiser to be proud of, a "sharing photos" section that enables easy emailing of pictures, slide show, and greetings card production with the Cookie Cutter tool, as well as printing help you might value, among other things.

It's primarily intended as a digital image editor, however, and some of the nifty features that have been pulled down from Photoshop CS make it a major player in the industry, so much so that those who consider themselves amateurs in the game will more readily move to Elements where previously they might have stuck with an alternative and less powerful photo editor.

Red-eye removal

Take, for example, that bane of digital photographers, red-eye. As cameras get smaller, and the flash unit moves closer to the lens, reflections from the back of the eye can easily give rise to unnatural reddening of the iris. Some editing programs make hard work of eliminating this effect in photos, but with Photoshop Elements 3.0 it's as simple as clicking on the required tool and then on the eye, whereupon the reddening disappears as if by magic. With customization of the colour if you don't think the automatic setting has got the iris colour quite right, it's a major boon.

Photoshop Elements 3.0 is quite smart at this sort of common task. The Spot Healing Brush, to take another example, can remove small blemishes rather neatly, and the Clone Stamp tool copies an area of your photo to cover unwanted detail. New in this release is the Healing Tool - when you've figured out how to use it properly - which works wonderfully to remove larger blemishes while magically preserving the general integrity of the area being worked upon, as in the example here.

You can select appropriate work areas, with Quick Fix or Standard Edit available as best suits the task in hand. The former presents all of the tools you might need for powerful photo editing, while the latter shows only a subset of the tools and commands, i.e. those intended for fixing the more common problems.

Main Menu

Task selection is via an impressive graphical menu as shown below. In all of this, though, the user has only a rather miserly 65 page user manual to refer to if the more thorough system help is not to be resorted to, with consequent overlays onto your work. Masochists, who don't mind using such integral help files, will manage well enough, especially if they've used photo editing software before, but those who prefer to have access to a printed page for guidance might struggle at first.

Elements seems to be primarily intended for Quick Fix addicts, and those whose intentions do not stretch too far into the depths of photo manipulation; such are unlikely to be disappointed. It's not that Elements 3.0 can't tackle advanced work, it's more to do with the limited help from the manufacturer by way of tutorial literature, and the presumption that the user is already familiar with the selection and application of the power tools on offer.

Quick Fix

The program offers multiple image adjustments in a single maneuver. Purists may well shudder at the thought, but there's no doubting the ability of Elements 3.0 to deliver the goods if that's what you need.

Things like colour balance, exposure correction, image brightness and contrast, and sharpening are easily carried out.

For the more demanding, Elements features all the main tools you need; you just have to learn how to use them. That may be easier than using Photoshop CS, but you still face a learning curve of sorts.

We were not particularly impressed when, without a prompt that we noticed, Elements took it upon itself to install a new Windows XP desktop theme - a full screen montage of the image we were working on at the time. We had no idea why that should have happened but, fortunately, it was a simple matter to revert to the original theme via desktop properties.

Support

To run Elements 3.0 you'll need Windows XP Home or Pro, with SP1 installed (or SP2), or Windows 2000 with SP4. You'll also need at least 256MB of RAM (512MB is preferred), an 800MHz Intel-compatible CPU, 600MB of disk space, the DirectX 9 driver, and an XGA display.

The program now supports RAW files of sundry types, a major boon to digital photographers. Check on the Adobe website that your particular camera's RAW image type is supported; you'll be unlucky if it isn't.

In conclusion

Adobe Photoshop Elements v3.0 is a power program wolf in sheep's clothing. With features galore, quick fixes to delight the amateur's heart, and it's offered at a price that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. The demands of the blossoming number of digital photographers have been well catered for. Highly recommended, especially if you don't mind learning via the program's help files as opposed to a detailed user manual.

 

Don Bradbury