Over the weekend I decided that I needed to upgrade my way of touching up photos. I have used trials of Photoshop in the past (which seems to be something they don't do anymore) and I had Photoshop Elements 1.0 from a CD that came with my Wacom Tablet. Now, Photoshop is great. It's got every tool that you can imagine in it. Photoshop Elements 1.0 was "OK" but was really not a very good program. So, I went to the Adobe site to see what the current stuff was that they had.
I started looking at their page trying to figure out how to justify spending $600 on Photoshop (I can usually justify anything, if need be). Well, as I was looking, I decided to revisit Elements (which is $100). I downloaded the trial version of it (which is now at 2.0). After about 10 minutes of use, I was hooked. It has all the tools needed for an amateur (and maybe even professional) photographer. I immediately purchased it because I can easily justify $100 vs. the $600 for full Photoshop.
What is nice about Elements is that it is made for photography. It pulls out all the commonly used tools for photo manipulation and puts them at your finger tips. It also has a bunch of "recipes" that will help the newbie learn what they are doing. It also has this really cool "sponge" feature that saturates or desaturates where you "sponge". Red eye removal is a snap, also. Plus, it still has all the filters that Photoshop has. It also has some really cheesy stuff (like a "frame" that looks like fake wood) but we'll ignore that for now. It also does not have real painting tools, but I didn't realize that it wasn't there until about 4 hours of use when I was going to tweak a color on something. A bit of creativity was all that was need to get around the problem. (Plus, you have to figure that the extra $500 for full Photoshop should buy you something extra;) ) Another neat feature is the printing feature. Since Elements is made for Photography, it has a "package" print feature so that you can print full sheets of pictures in the sizes that you want. No more wasted paper! (well....at least in theory...)
Another neat product that Adobe has is Photoshop Album. It's $49.95. I bought it just because I felt like spending more money and I wanted two killer features that it has. The first feature: it has "tagging". What is tagging? Well, you can ad tags to a picture so that you can find it easier. If I have a picture of my dog, I can tag it with "Dog", "Quincey", "dachshund" or whatever else will remind me of the picture. After the picture is tagged, I can search for it by the keyword. The second feature: it has a calendar. I know that sounds lame at first, but wait until you hear what this calender will do! Ok, so you take all the photos that you have and slap them into this area and then create a calender. Now, once you have done this, Album looks at the file information to know when the image was created and then places on that day in the calendar. So, you know that you took a picture at a Birthday party on July 12th, but you have no idea where it is on your drive....well, with the calender, you just go to that day and find it (it will even preview it for you and you can sort through multiple pictures on the same day). This organization that my brain can relate to!
So, in short, "Elements" should be called "Cheap Photoshop for the Newbie" and "Album" should be titled "Organization for the idiots who can't remember where they put stuff".
Elements gets a 4 coffee cup rating:
