Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements 4

Iain Laskey looks at what's new with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4

Product	Photoshop Elements 4
Company	Adobe
Web	www.adobe.co.uk
Price	£69.99
We like	Selection tools, pan & zoom in slide shows, price
We don't like	Loss of file browser
Rating	9/10
Requirements

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 aims to be everything the photographer wants for tweaking and fixing their images. Whilst the professional's prefer its more expensive big brother Photoshop CS, Elements isn't to be sniffed at and offers 80% of the power for 10%of the price.

Our own Don Bradbury looked at version 3 here so in this review we'll concentrate on what's new.

The biggest surprise 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 dos 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 we 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 we 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 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.

We 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 our opinion a must have.

To help get the most from it, you may be interested in some of our book reviews:

Book: Photoshop Elements 4 Collection

Book: Photoshop Elements 3 - The missing Manual

Book: Photoshop Elements 3 for Digital Photographers

 

Iain Laskey
See Iain's site at www.pcbookreview.com