Learn Elements Now - Photoshop Elements 7

With the newest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements, Adobe's contact the online subscription message really thick. Take, as an example , the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one among the applications.

 

The standard Organize, Edit, Create, and Share options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared with the massive , rotating slide show heralding the various benefits of the free and $49.99 Plus memberships for Photoshop.com (more project templates, remote backup, and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might also have sold the space as an ad; it's that annoying. and that is regrettable , because Photoshop Elements remains a really nice midrange photo editor, but all of those bells and whistles--some pretty off-key--increasingly detract from its core strengths.

 

The main advantage to the program is that it's less costly than Photoshop and Lightroom, yet is powerful enough for many photo editing tasks. Consequently, the improved raw workflow is sort of improved; basically you now can bypass it entirely if you would like . as an example , so as to make a slide show of NEF files, the program will simply apply the default raw-processing settings and treat them like JPEGs.

 

One new feature is that the text search box up the organizer, which may be a fast, easy thanks to filter by keywords or basic metadata. take care however because it searches for very basic metadata only; you'll only search on time, data, camera, and caption text. But that ought to be sufficient for basic home users.

 

Of course there's always one feature per version that's designed to blow your socks off; Elements 7 is not any different and includes the Photomerge Scene Cleaner, basically an extension of Group Shot. Photomerge allows you to effortlessly combine variations of a photograph to get rid of unwanted objects within the scene.

 

Typically features like these never work on behalf of me without an excellent little bit of work on my end; amazingly enough this one did, on two random photos (which met the similarity criteria). i have never tried the opposite variations, Photomerge Faces, or Panorama--but those are derivative of existing Photoshop CS3 tools.

 

Adobe has also updated adjustment operations through the utilization of Smart Brushes, which consolidate multi-operation adjustments, like selecting then creating a replacement effects layer, into one selection operation that automatically generates the layer and mask.

 

Still, i can not get around how confusing the interface remains; i feel the most reason is that everything seems organized by technology, instead of by task. A hodgepodge of stuff lives on the Guided palette, a number of which you cannot find elsewhere within the program, just like the Photomerge tools, or which don't seem guiding in the least , just like the Saturated Slide Film effect or the Action Player.

 

The latter runs scripts that request user input, which is why i think they're considered Guided, but therein respect they're no different than dialog boxes or Wizards. Before and after views are still only available in band aid and Guided modes. I just can't remember where to seek out things tons of the time.

 

Unfortunately the items i would like changed usually never change before the merchandise shipping. Things that i'm guessing will improve are the performance (the beta version is slow) and therefore the selection of presets, actions, and templates (they're pretty thin). Believe me, when the merchandise ships the top of September i will be able to definitely be checking to ascertain if there are any pleasant surprises. Price is predicted to be within the range of $79.99 or $99.99, counting on if you purchase it via the Adobe store and/or believe mail-in rebates. Add $40 for the plus-membership option.