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Adobe Adds Photomerge, Recompose, More in Photoshop Elements 8

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:49:45 -0500

This week, Adobe announced its eighth generation of Photoshop Elements for both PC and Mac, and this time Mac users need to wait only a month for the latest version.

PSE 8 for Windows Adds Easy Smarts

Adobe's new Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows adds a number of features for easier photo editing, including:

Photomerge Exposure, which builds upon the powerful Photomerge feature in earlier versions of PE to enable you to combine the properly-exposed areas in two otherwise-identical photos into a "single, perfectly-lit photo." The example Adobe demonstrates uses two photos of friends posing in front of a floodlit building, one with and without flash. It'll be interesting to see how Photomerge Exposure does with a pair of RAW images optimized for bright and dark areas.
Recompose, which allows you to intelligently stretch a photo to fit in a particular frame without distorting the main subject. The example Adobe uses converts a landscape-format photo into a square photo, but inquiring minds (like mine) are wondering about converting 4:3 photos into 16:9 photos (and vice-versa).
Smarter, faster quick fixes for exposure, teeth whitening, bluer skies, contrast, and more with better previews.
Get more online storage (20GB versus 2GB), tutorials, artwork, and templates by upgrading to (or buying up front) Photoshop Elements 8 Plus.

PSE 8 also adds better photo management:

An enhanced Organizer with Auto-Analyzer technology automatically tags photos by type (closeup, high contrast, and more).
People Recognition technology for automatic tagging of people in both video clips and photos.
Automatic media synchronization across computers.

Compare PSE 8 for Windows to PSE 7 and PSE 6 here http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/upgrade/?view=compare.

Mac Users Get Even More Goodies

The Mac version, due out in October, has all of the features of PSE 8 for Windows, and also adds:

Adobe Bridge CS4 technology for photo management
PhotoMerge Scene Cleaner to remove unwanted elements from a series of similar photos
SmartBrush and Touch-Up brushes for retouching

How to Try, How to Buy

Adobe, which has sometimes been laggard in providing trials of its latest Photoshop Elements editions, is on the ball with Photoshop Elements 8, offering information, free trials, and special rebate or prerelease offers for PSE 8 for Windows, PSE8 for MacOS, the companion Premiere Elements 8 for Windows, and the Photoshop Elements 8/Premiere Elements 8 bundle for Windows. Note: you must have (or sign up for) a free Adobe account to download trials.

Illustration adapted from Adobe website illustrations of product cover art.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:45:32 -0600

A fast car won’t make you turn better laps at Laguna Seca. A pair of $200 sneakers won’t help you outplay Lebron James, and installing Photoshop CS4 won’t make your photos magically better. While that may be true, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 7.0 will almost certainly make the average person’s photos better. Now in its seventh iteration, Elements 7.0 uses the guts of the extremely powerful Photoshop and tries to make it friendly to everyone.

A new feature in Elements 7.0 allows you to combine multiple shots of you, say, standing in front of a statue and subtract people who rudely walk into the frame. It’s the inverse of a feature added in Elements 6.0 that lets you easily combine multiple group photos to create one family picture without someone blinking or sticking his or her tongue out.

Other easy as pie touches include a new tool to whiten teeth or make the sky bluer and a few easy photo effects such as the ability to give an image a line-drawing look, an old-fashioned photo look, or a saturated slide look. None of these are exactly new concepts, but we do appreciate the simplicity of it. Those looking for a bit more fun will probably find it in the Smart Brush Tool. It’s what you might expect based on its name: a very smart brush. Choose it and click from a wide assortment of changes, such as blue skies or high contrast and then paint an object. The brush will stick to similarly colored or toned pixels on the screen, so you could change someone’s sweater from blue to yellow in a snap.

Adobe has pushed additional integration with its Photoshop.com service. The freebie Photoshop.com gives you about 2GB of storage space, the ability to back up your photos online, access to a limited set of themes and tutorials, and the use of a mobile phone client for uploading and viewing photos. The client, however, is pretty limited in handset support, but Adobe does point you to ShoZu as an alternative. Ponying up $50 per year gets you 20GB of space, additional themes, and tutorials.

Initially, we didn’t understand why you’d even want Photoshop.com when you can get unlimited storage at websites like Smugmug for $40. The answer: photo editing. You can access and edit the photos that you have on Flickr.com using the far more feature-rich Photoshop Express on Photoshop.com. It’s a neat feature, but 20GB still seems miserly in a day of cheap 16GB memory cards and 15MP cameras.

Elements’s list price of $140 may seem steep, but it includes one year of Photoshop.com. Far more palatable is the $80 street price of the app. At $80, it’s well worth the investment for the person looking to jazz up their photos. It’s not perfect, of course; we’d like see high dynamic range photography support (which is included in the competing Paintshop Pro Photo X2), and finding some of the cool features, like the excellent Magic Extractor, isn’t easy; however, for basic photographers who want quick and easy photo enhancement, it’s tough to beat Photoshop Elements 7.0.

Adobe Photoshop Elements Turns 6

Mark 'Marcus Soperus' Soper — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:26:33 -0500

If it's autumn, it must be time for a new version of Adobe's Photoshop Elements. Photoshop Elements 6 is now available on store shelves as well as from Adobe (but you can beat Adobe's online price by $20 or so by shopping at stores like Wal-Mart). It's been just over a year since version 5.0 hit store shelves, so should PE5 fans head back for a new version?

Photomerge Gets Smarter - and Easier

PE 6 brings the much-improved version of Photomerge pioneered in Photoshop CS3 over to the consumer side. The original Photomerge was designed for landscapes only, but the new version also adds support for faces and group shots - perfect for solving the problem of "somebody's eyes were closed - again!"

Better and Easier Photo Editing

Choose from full-featured, quick, or guided step-by-step photo repairs
Easier area selection tools
Better healing brushes
Easier clone tool operation
Better brightness/contrast controls

Get Artistic with PE6

PE6 improves the black-and-white conversion options inherited from PE5, adds better RAW file support, and an improved photo book creation feature. Like to create multiple versions of a photo? PE6 stacks them automatically for you.

Photo Organizing and Sharing Made Simple

Instead of clicking all over the place to locate CD burning, slide show, email, and other sharing features, PE6 puts them all in one place with the new Sharing Center.

Find the photos you want by specifying multiple search criteria with Smart Albums.

Bundle Up! PE6 + Adobe Premiere Elements 4

Adobe continues to provide single-package savings for photo and video fans by bundling PE6 with the new Premiere Elements 4 (or you can buy it separately). New features in Premiere Elements 4 include:

Support for direct uploading to YouTube and mobile devices
Video style effects and transitions for photo slide shows
Video freeze frame effects
Transformation of frames into disc covers and albums
Movie themes
New audio mixer
Improved title animation
HD /Blu-ray Disc support
Automatic optimization for playback on any device

Time for an Upgrade? Hopefully, Soon!

Whether you're strictly a digital photo fan or have a leg in both the digital photo and digital video world, upgrading to PE6 or the PE6 plus Premiere Element 4 bundle makes sense. Better features and improved ease of use make the upgrade worthwhile - if you use Windows XP SP2 or Vista. Unfortunately, MacOS is still on PE4, but Adobe promises version 6 for MacOS in early 2008.

However, keep in mind that some users are reporting significant bugs in Premiere Elements 4 and some users running Windows Vista are less than pleased with PE6's performance (see related articles). Adobe frequently introduces patch files not long after shipping a program, so keep a watch on the Downloads page at Adobe.com for updates. Hopefully, Adobe will fix any lingering bugs sooner rather than later, because PE6 and Premiere Elements 4 have exciting new features you'll want to try.

Windows Media Center + Adobe Photoshop Elements = More Photo Fun

Mark Soper — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:42:41 -0500

Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions include Windows Media Center (WMC), an updated version of the Windows XP Media Center Edition "10 foot UI" designed to help you enjoy your media from across the room on a big-screen TV. Unfortunately, WMC doesn't include support for Photoshop (PSD) files. But, if you've installed Photoshop Elements 5 (PE5) since you installed Windows Vista, you already have the solution to your problem.

Launching PE5 from Within WMC

Photoshop Elements 5 is one of an increasing number of third-party apps that can hook into WMC. To launch PE5's WMC features, open the Pictures + Videos menu in WMC and scroll horizontally to locate the Adode Photoshop icon. Click it to start PE5's WMC interface.

How PE5 Supercharges WMC

From within WMC, PE5 disp[ays photos in full-screen with more playback options and transitions than WMC provides and - most importantly - enables WMC to display photos saved in formats normally not recognized by WMC, especially Adobe's own PSD format, which supports layers of various kinds, including object and adjustment layers.

Better Photo Selection

You can view all photos included in a Photoshop Elements catalog or select photos by date, by tag, or by collection. The Select Photos by Date feature displays a calendar; dates with pictures feature a thumbnail image of one of the photos taken on that date (see figure). You can also view photos by a specified date range. These features beat out WMC's Picture Library (which groups photos by the month) for convenience.

Better Photo Playback

Use the Slide Show menu to choose playback duration, transitions, and speed when you view your photos in WMC with PE5 (don't confuse this with the option to play back slide shows created with PE5). The default Fade transition provides a very smooth transition between images, very useful if you're wanting to view several versions of the same photo with different effects (full color, black-and-white, exposure adjustments, and so on).

Create Catalogs and Collections to Help PE5 Find All of Your Photos

To enable PE5's WMC support to find all of your photos, be sure to create a catalog of your photos when you use PE5 from the Windows Vista desktop. Otherwise, it displays only images you created or edited with PE5. To make it even easier to view your photos, create collections of related photos in PE5 and browse them within PE5's WMC interface.

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