Product ReviewsMultimedia software
Photoshop Elements 8 updates Adobe's cut-price image-editing application with some new features that bring greater control and a higher degree of automation to image editing. Ease of use is the byword here: Photoshop Elements is now more intuitive than ever, with some truly remarkable editing tools. Elements presents you with a tabbed interface, hiding non-essential controls until they're required. For basic image enhancement, the Quick Edit mode allows you to adjust lighting, saturation and colour balance via simple sliders. You can choose to view the result side by side with the original, and both panes are zoomed and panned as one. A Smart Fix control applies 'intelligent' auto adjustment, but rather than being a single button, it's a slider, so you can control the degree to which the image is altered. There's also a nine-image grid mode, in which you're shown variations on the target image and can drag the pointer in each one to apply that effect to a greater or lesser degree. The problem here is that the thumbnails are too tiny to show the effect clearly, and the process ends up being frustrating rather than time-saving. What's particularly clumsy is that if the grid view is open and you select, say, the Shadows slider further down, the grid will shrink and close, and all the adjustments will shuffle up to fill the space, leaving you dragging a slider that's now several centimetres above your cursor. In Full editing mode, you have access to the whole range of compositing and adjustment tools, including the new Smart Brush. You use this to pick an adjustment from the wide range on offer, such as High Contrast, Lighten Skintones or special effects such as Impressionista and Silver Sparkle. Dragging the tool over the image auto-selects
The most significant new feature is Recompose, which - like its Photoshop counterpart, Content Aware Scaling - has the ability to change the shape of an image while preserving all the features of interest intact. Figures are moved closer together and dull areas of background are squeezed up while retaining the integrity and focus of the original. Elements also provides the ability to mark out specific areas of an image you want kept or, interestingly, removed: you can brush over a figure and he or she will be taken out of the picture as it's recomposed. This feature is impressive, but not perfect - it isn't unusual to get a few unwanted artefacts cropping up in the final image, although it's generally easy to take these out with the Clone tool later. A welcome feature is the introduction of exposure-based photo merging, which allows you to take several shots of the same scene, bracketed for different exposures, and then seamlessly blend them together to create a result that incorporates the best of each image. At its most basic level, you could use it to take two photographs of the same scene, one with flash to fill in the foreground subject and one without to capture the background, then automatically compose them to create a perfectly balanced shot. Although this is version 8, version 7 was only for the PC, which means Mac users now get features introduced in the previous build, including an overlay for the Clone tool showing the area to be cloned, a keyboard shortcut to scale brush sizes on the fly and user-definable guides. PC users, on the other hand, now have the addition of a face-recognising, auto-keywording browser. Mac users have much of this in iPhoto, and can browse images with Bridge CS4 instead. There's a lot to like, and it's a significant improvement on earlier versions. Now that the Mac and PC versions are being brought out concurrently, it's to be hoped that we'll no longer be left behind in the upgrade race. By Steve Caplin
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
