Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 Reviews

For me, the three key considerations are 1) Powerful image editing tools, 2) Ease of use, and 3) The learning curve.

POWERFUL IMAGE EDITING TOOLS?
Elements2 has multiple tools and techniques to accomplish any image-editing task.

Cropping, rotating and changing perspective is easy. Changing perspective is useful to "straighten out" vertical lines of buildings when the picture is shot with a wide-angle lens. If the horizon in the picture is slightly off, don't worry. There's a technique (window-info command) to measure the angle of the horizon to a fraction of a degree to determine how much to rotate the picture to make the horizon "perfectly level".

The "red eye" correction tool is elegantly simple and yet very precise.

Lighting can be adjusted with levels, contrast, brightness and layers commands. Fill flash and studio lighting (filter-render-lighting effects command) can be added to the photo to correct for poor scene lighting when the picture was taken.

Color correction and adjustment couldn't be faster or easier; it's all done with a few mouse clicks. One mouse click can eliminate a color cast. The "color variations" command lets you change colors of midtones, highlights, and shadows and adjust saturation and brightness while viewing thumbnail previews of the potential adjustments. And there's a slick "replace color" command to change part or all of the image.

At some point in image editing, you want to adjust part of the image, not the entire image. Selection tools make this possible. Elements2 has the best selection tools I've seen. All of the selection tools work together making it fast and easy to select a part of the image with "surgical precision". Most competitive programs either make you work to make selections or they lack precision. Elements2 takes the work out of the selection process.

I believe selection tools and layers are the key to serious image editing. Elements2 has the best selection tools and an excellent set of tools to work with layers. It's simply the best software for serious image editing. Professionals will probably opt for the more sophisticated Adobe Photoshop software, but Elements2 is everything I need.

Most competitive image editing software does not provide color management tools. But Elements2 includes Adobe Gamma software to adjust your monitor so that your printer can faithfully produce the colors you see on the screen. You have to e-mail Hewlett Packard to learn how to set your printer configuration. Once you've done that, Elements2 gives you several choices in the "print preview" command to fine tune color management of printed output.

EASE OF USE?
Adobe's software engineers did their homework. They have tamed power by making almost every image editing task possible by a few mouse clicks. The "quick fix" command is elegantly simple and yet it provides a wide range of adjustments to photos. Once you have used a command it is easy to remember. The user interface is simple.

THE LEARNING CURVE?
How long does it take for a novice to learn the program? I viewed the tutorials from the Elements2 welcome screen and reviewed the manual. The tutorials were too simplistic. They taught just one thing to a novice who needs a perspective for this software. The Elements2 manual is "dry" reading, like a dictionary. The manual is not really a tutorial, it's more of a reference assuming you already know the basics of how to use the program.

What's the novice to do??? A good way to learn new software is a book. I read "Photoshop Elements2 - Zero To Hero". It is written in a narrative, easy to read form with lots of examples. Within a few hours with the book, I became comfortable with Elements2 and found that I could use the new software easily.

If I had not bought a book, I probably would have complained that this software is hard to use. In my opinion, novices can't figure out how to use Elements2 if they limit learning to what Adobe supplies with the software.

Do yourself a favor; buy a book written in a narrative format. Spend a few hours with the book. You'll gain a perspective for the program and how to use it. Once you have that, you can use the Element2 manual as a reference to learn about some specific aspect of the program. Also, you can use the recipes and hints that Adobe includes in Elements2.

BOTTOM LINE
Photoshop Elements2 = SIMPLY THE BEST FOR SERIOUS IMAGE EDITING.

Rating: 5 - Try the Free Demo First!
After using many different programs....PictureIt, PhotoExpress, Photo Print Gold, and even Photo Soap...I love Elements! I've used the full version of Photoshop at my work and yet this version has everything I need for working with my digital photos. If you are a professional photographer or graphic artist or something, you'll need the real thing, but for anyone just taking home photos and wanting to clean-up and print photos, this is an amazingly powerful program.

Also, I really appreciate the fact that Adobe will let you download a preview version on their website so you can test it out first. It shows that they have faith you will like it and turn around and buy it.

In the end, this one has all of the features I want/need in a photo editing program and it is worth the price. The only other suggestion I would give is that if you plan to work with digital photos, you should take a short class on how to use the features. I used Photoshop LE for a couple years and didn't realize all the features in there that could have really helped me! I got Elements and took a class for just a couple hours and the difference in my photos is amazing!

Rating: 5 - Incredible value for money.
That may be a statement open to debate, since everybody's software seems to do so much nowadays. But I'm commenting from experience of Photoshop 5.0, which wasn't that long ago, and Photoshop LE, Elements' precursor.

Elements 2.0 is about as much Photoshop as most people would require. It is now able to create .PDF files for use in the Acrobat Reader, and has many simply executed commands for effects and touch-ups for the newbie. But after a while, the user would want to get into the more sophisticated options available by way of the Enhance tab. The two most useful are to be found at: Enhance > Adjust Brightness/Contrast > Levels - Crtl+L and, Enhance > Adjust Color > Hue & Saturation - Ctrl+U .

They would also want to go: Edit > Preferences > General , and uncheck the Export to Clipboard box. Uncheck the Backwards Compatibility box in the Save As section. And - if they have more than one partition - select one of the others for Scratch Disk use. This will avoid hanging the computer and keep file sizes much tighter.

The Window > Undo History is such a great feature, as it allows the user to step back along a path of work if they have made a number of mistakes, or simply want to compare pre and post results.

Unlike Photoshop LE, Elements is pretty demanding of computer resources, so the user's machine would need to be in good order and have a CPU in excess of 400Mhz to avoid slow launching of the application. Also, the installation might need some consideration via the Custom install if disk space is limited. Still doesn't directly integrate with Acrobat for editing an image by using Ctrl and double clicking with the touch-up object tool. You still need the full Photoshop for that. Not something that many will miss ;-)

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Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0