Adobe Photoshop Elements 8
Thursday, 12 November 2009
The last Photoshop Elements didn’t last long on my Mac. It wasn’t the best version of Elements that Adobe has produced. Fortunately, this latest version totally redeems Adobe’s consumer-level image editor. It opens fast (tested on a 13-inch MacBook Pro) into a workmanlike, if dark, neutral-grey workspace. You can change this, in the frighteningly PC-like Preferences panel, to a lighter grey. Elements is very popular on Windows’ machines, whereas on the Mac many rely on the free iPhoto. Elements takes editing well into the next level.
I like the way the icon for Elements 8 for Mac is a lower-case ‘pse’ (Photo-Shop Elements), to differentiate it from the ‘pro’ apps in CS4 which have, for example, ‘Ps’ for Photoshop and ‘Ai’ for Illustrator.
Immediately what sprung to my mind was ‘Lightroom’! rather than Photoshop (the usual comparison), but this was just as an opening, visual impression. Mind you, also like Lightroom, immediately noticeable was that there are three main modes in which to use El8 – Lightroom uses step-through modes which prefer you to follow through an analogue-darkroom-style ‘development’ process with mode tabs at upper right.
The three El8 modes are EDIT, CREATE and SHARE, and you don’t have to go through them in sequence.
Lightroom similarities aside, some of the common Photoshop commands work straight away, like Command-Plus and -Minus to zoom in and out. Also, I notice the Photoshop Save As file format options are there. But the brilliant Photoshop option to Fade a filter or other effect is not to be found. I love this – over-apply a filter and back it off with Fade until you’re happy. This is a shame considering how heavy the effects of some of the included filters are, like Rough Pastels, Smudge Stick, Canvas etc are. For yes, many (maybe all) of Photoshop’s filters are available, under EDIT Full. If you wanted, and were serious enough and Elements 8 was your primary editor, since El8 has Layers, your could duplicate the image, run a filter over the top layer and play with opacity between them to tone down the effect, I guess.
EDIT FullThe EDIT tab comes with what Apple calls a ‘disclosure triangle’ so you can pop it to choose between and EDIT Full, Quick or Guided.
EDIT Quick gives you Smart Fix (which has an Auto button), with a slider to increase the amount of ‘fixing’ you want. This is smart in that the extreme left setting maintains the image as is, while extreme right considerably lightens the exposure while maintaining a pure black and the white highlight. Even after pressing Auto you can manipulate the slider, which is good.
Then there’s a Lighting panel, with Levels and Contrast Auto buttons, a Lighten Shadows and Darken Highlights slider (again, two features of Lightroom), and a Midtone Contrast slider.
Beneath that is a Colour panel with controls (and Auto) for Saturation (amount of colour intensity) and Hue (colour shift).
Beneath that, Balance lets you control Temperature (how warm or cold your image looks) and Tint, and below that is the Detail panel, which may as well be called Sharpen as that’s all it contains. But if you’re unsure of how Sharpening works and how to use it, the Auto button does a pretty good job, have to say.
Guided Edit is cool too. It starts with the caption ‘What would you like to do?’
Beneath that there are Basic Photo Edits (crop, recompose, rotate/straighten, sharpen), Lightening and Exposure (lighten or darken, brightness and contrast, levels), Colour Correction (enhance colours, remove a cast, correct a skin tone), Guided Activities ( touch-up, editing guide, fix keystone distortion) Photomerge (group shot, faces, scene cleaner and exposure), Automated Actions (with an Action Player) and Photographic Effects (line drawing, old fashioned photo and saturated slide film effect.).
Woa, that’s quite a good summary of many of the capabilities of El8, placing it pretty squarely more towards Photoshop than iPhoto on the scale of editing panache.
And some of the new capabilities, especially Merge, demand more attention.
Create
Under Create the balance tips back towards iPhoto with the ability to make a Photo Book, Greeting Card, Photo Prints, Photo Collage, Web Photo Gallery and a PDF Slideshow. (Many of these options are already in iPhoto, with the added fillip that you can purchase the results directly using your iTunes’ account.)
Share
Under Share, you can distribute your creations as a Web Photo Gallery, an email attachment, CD/DVD or as a PDF slideshow.
Work bar
Across the top of your El8 workspace you get the usual Close, Minimise and Maximise Apple buttons, then a new New (create new document) button, the Bridge launcher button, a Save icon, Help and a grid button for different image viewing layouts.
Beneath that you have the Brush shape/size controls, like Photoshop’s. This area changes to give you correct options for whatever tool you have clicked on.
Across on the right, you have a Reset Panels, Undo and Redo and below that the EDIT, CREATE and SHARE tabs.
Tools
Down the left side of your Elements 8 workspace is a long, slim toolbar, again reminiscent of Photoshop. The tools are Move (solid pointer), Zoom tool (a magnifier icon), the Grabber hand for moving around inside zoomed-in workspaces, Eyedropper for selecting colours from images, Marquee (rectangular selection tool), Lasso (freehand mouse-drag selection tool), Magic Wand (for selecting colour ranges by direct-clicking), the Quick Selection Tool (drag over colour ranges to build selections), the Type tool, the Crop tool, Cookie Cutter (shape selection tool, in preset shapes selected from the top work-bar), and the Straighten tool.
Below that is the Red Eye Removal Tool, then the Spot Healing Brush tool, Clone Stamp, Eraser, Brush, Smart Brush, Paint Bucket, the Gradient and Rectangle tools, and then a Blur (apply blur selectively with your mouse) and a Sponge tool.
Below that is the swatch-swap panel displaying foreground and background colours you have selected.
Some of the tools, again like Photoshop, have pop-outs that give more options. Just press and hold on any tool with a little disclosure triangle to see those. These include the Rectangular Marquee which has an Elliptical option, the Lasso with Magnetic and Polygonal (click-to-place) options, a Selection Brush under Quick Selection, three additional Type tools, a Recompose tool under Crop, a Healing Brush under the Healing Spot Brush, a Pattern Stamp under Clone Stamp, two additional Eraser types, three fancier Brush options, a Detail Smart Brush under Smart Brush, six more shapes under Rectangle, Sharpen and Smudge under Blur and, finally, Dodge (selectively lighten) and Burn (selectively darken) under Sponge, which sucks colour where you apply it, BTW.
Almost all of these tools are direct equivalents of Photoshop tools.
Notes on the tools
The Straighten tool is not as easy to use or as intuitive as iPhoto’s, which puts a non-printing alignment grid over the image to square things up to, but it combines an elusive function of the ruler tool in Photoshop with its innate Rotate Arbitrary ability. In El8, you just drag a line with the straighten tool along a should-be vertical or should-be horizontal, and the image straightens.
Recompose (above, showing it’s handy guide dialogue box) harnesses another ability of the latest CS4 version of Photoshop – the ability to stretch or shrink areas of images considered unimportant while protecting those you require; ie not shrinking or contracting some portions while doing that to others. This is pretty amazing. Say you take a picture of two people standing, facing your camera, but by the time you get to your Mac and open the image, you wish hey’d stood half a metre closer. No sweat. Select All, choose the Recompose tool and you just drag one side of the image towards the other until you’re happy. El8 protects the people and seamlessly concentrates the unimportant space between them. And it’s surprisingly effective.
The Smart Brush lets you create quick selections, then add adjustment-layer effects for bluer skies, black-and-white effects, whiter teeth and other enhancements. Since making selections and masks can be hard to grasp and a lengthy process, the Smart Brush tool helps simplify these tasks and lets you immediately see results without having to go through multiple steps.
That’s really cool, and even hard-out Photoshop users would benefit from the easier utility of some of El8’s capabilities, but it must be said, this is hardly amateur, user-friendly and intuitive software any more. These tools, along with layers, make El8 powerhouse and sophisticated. If users have grown into the new iPhoto versions with its histograms and more powerful tools, sure, but iPhoto can be bewildering enough for new-off-the-rank users. The only real reason to use it over Photoshop is price, but if you do, you’re well on the way to learning that professional app.
Back in the Photoshop camp, this Mac version of Elements 8 includes Adobe Bridge CS4, the cataloging tool that works with all kinds of files, not just photos. Alternatively, Windows users get ‘Organizer’ with their version of Elements 8. The Loupe tool, which is available in Bridge, once again gives you a Lightroom-like tool; the handy magnifier for reviewing image quality.
The Open dialogue in the File menu (or Command-o) lets you directly open photos from iPhoto or Aperture libraries, unlike version 6.
If you want to keep using iPhoto as your primary photo cataloguer, by the way, you can set it up in iPhoto’s General preferences (< left) so that when you ‘edit’ photos, they open in Elements 8. So long as you work only with JPEG or TIFF files, perform only basic editing tasks in Elements, and are careful to save the file without changing the file format, the edited photo will automatically shows up in iPhoto, but if you create a more complex file from your original or you want to edit Raw files within Elements, you’ll need to take the extra step of importing the updated version back into iPhoto.
Conclusion: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 is very slick and powerful, to the point where some tools (like the new Recompose) take a few seconds to tick through larger images once applied. It’s not really an amateur tool any more, but it’s a good price and the Tool Tips that pop out when you hover your mouse over anything and the excellent EDIT Guide mode should really help a lot if you apply yourself.
What’s great the ‘smart’ and auto fixes work really well under EDIT, and the new Recompose and the Smart Brush are excellent.
What’s not pretty complex and powerful application (note that there are free training videos on Photoshop Elements at Adobe TV: http://tv.adobe.com).
Needs time and energy to invest to learn great skills
Looks 7/10
Usability 8/10
Value for money 10/10
> Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, $220 (approximately, depending on exchange rates)
Description consumer version of Photoshop has some Elements-only features.
System available in English, French, German, Japanese; requires multi–core Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.11—10.5.8, or Mac OS X v10.6; 512MB of RAM (1GB recommended); 64MB of video RAM and 1024x768 display resolution; 2GB of available hard-disk space (additional free space required during installation); DVD-ROM drive. QuickTime 7 software required for multimedia features and internet connection required for Internet-based services
Contact Adobe Pacific (free trial available), available from online or from Apple Resellers.
