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- Platform: Windows XP / Vista / 7, Mac OS X
- Media: CD-ROM
- Item Quantity: 1
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Product Description
Manufacturer's Description
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 -- The complete solution for extraordinary photos
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 software delivers powerful yet easy-to-use editing options that help you tell your life stories in amazing ways. Make every photo look its best and quickly share your memories on Facebook*, in Online Albums and in printed photo books, cards, calendars, and more. With Adobe Photoshop Elements 9, you can enjoy a complete solution for photos whether you're using Microsoft Windows or Mac OS.
- Make every photo look the way you want with easy-to-use editing options.
- Make photo books, cards, calendars and other creations that look just the way you want.
- Quickly share photos in fun, interactive Online Albums and on mobile devices.
- Automatically organise all your photos and video clips from one convenient place.
Do it all with one powerful yet easy-to-use product Use Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 software for all your photo needs. Manage, edit and enhance photos and make photo creations that look just the way you want. Then you can share them in print, on the web and on popular devices.
Experience the ultimate media-management hub Quickly organise all your media in one convenient place. Find your best photos and clips-or photos that feature specific people-thanks to automated options, then dive into a full range of creative activities and start enjoying your memories.
Go from flawed to phenomenal in seconds Get just the photo fixes you’re looking for with one-step shortcuts that whiten teeth and make skies a vibrant blue. When you perform one-step photo adjustments—including color, contrast, and lighting—you can quickly choose the best result from a group of adjustment previews. Instantly unclutter a photo and beautifully blend in the background.
Dramatically transform your photos with easy-to-use options Convert your colour originals to elegant, nuanced black-and-whites or use colour curves adjustments to get the perfect exposure. Count on step-by-step assistance. Want to easily fix a scratch, create a reflection effect or design a scrapbook page? Get help with key steps to get the results you want fast.
Easily create the perfect photo Take advantage of amazing Photomerge technology to easily match the style of one photo to another, create fuller panoramas, perfectly lit shots and great group shots and combine elements of different faces for entertaining results.
Show off your creativity with flexible layouts Make amazing printed photo creations like scrapbook pages, photo books, calendars, and cards. Create them in minutes using professionally designed templates or let your creativity run wild and access every photo-editing option from directly within your layout. Get fun, fresh looks with new artwork and templates.
Share experiences in fresh, exciting ways on the web Show off your photos in one-of-a-kind Online Albums with your choice of animated templates, including all-new options for sharing photos and videos together with music. Adobe Flash technology lets viewers interact with your photos for an entertaining experience.
Top new benefits
Instantly unclutter or repair photos Is your photo cluttered with telephone wires, tourists or passing cars? Make unwanted elements vanish with one stroke of the enhanced Spot Healing Brush, which beautifully blends even the most complex background. Also instantly fix old or torn photos so you can make new prints.
Easily match a favorite photo style Want to imitate a favorite photography style, like a dramatic high contrast image or a beautiful, rich colour tone? Photomerge Style Match analyses the stylistic qualities of any photo you choose and then automatically applies those qualities to another photo.
Create fuller panoramas Easily create your best-looking panoramas yet. With its enhanced blending capabilities, Photomerge Panorama fills in jagged edges as it automatically stitches together multiple horizontal or vertical photos.
Create stunning photo effects Easily create stunning effects that enhance your photos with professional style. New Guided Edits help you create pop art masterpieces, reflection effects, perfect portraits and more.
Create richly layered photos Bring new sophistication to your photos. Reveal one portion of a photo through another photo by using layer masks to control the transparency of specific areas.
Create the way you want Make photo creations the way that works best for you thanks to Basic and Advanced design modes that let you choose your level of control.
Conveniently print photo creations at home Admire and share your photos in custom wall calendars, greeting cards and photo books that you can print with your home printer.
Quickly share photos and videos on Facebook Conveniently share photos and videos on Facebook* directly from the Organiser, which automatically optimises your media so it looks its best.
Enjoy support for Mac multitouch Take advantage of the hands-on capabilities of Mac multitouch technology.
Get a complete photo solution for Macs Use a Mac for your photos? You can now experience the ultimate media-management hub for organising your photos, and quickly find your best photos and video clips—or photos that feature specific people—thanks to automated options.
*This product may allow you to extend its functionality by accessing certain features that are hosted online either by Adobe or third parties, provided you have a high-speed Internet connection. Adobe online services are only available for users age 13 and older. Such Adobe and third party online services and some features thereof, may not be available in all countries, languages, and/or currencies and may be discontinued in whole or in part without notice. Use of such online services may be governed by separate terms of use and privacy policies, and access to some services may require user registration. Some online services, including services that are initially offered at no charge, may be subject to additional fees and require a separate subscription.
Product Description
Customer Reviews
New to Elements 9 is the enhanced 'spot healing brush' that wowed Photoshop CS5 users. Just go over a background object in the photo with the 'Content aware' brush tool and hopefully the unwanted item vanishes by blending information in from nearby - ideal for removing things like a car, person, lamppost or seagull [it works well for natural scenes]. This 'content aware' healing brush doesn't always get it right though, but often results improve with fresh attempts. There's also a new guided edit tool that can create pop art, startling graphics and reflections. Photomerge [the superb panorama stitching tool] has been `enhanced' [the blending works better]. Interestingly layer masks have been introduced, one area that lagged behind Photoshop CS5. There's now a tool to transform your new photo into a similar style to an older one [i.e. apply it's contrast and colour vividness] so the photos look good next to each other. There's also some new minor stuff [for me] like quicker uploads to Facebook, an improved editing interface within creation layout, the ability to create and print calendars and suchlike, and create virtual photo-album's scrapbook style [Serif's Scrapbook Artist 2 is more fun for this]. There's also new support for Apple Mac's `multitouch' hardware. The `Plus' version of Elements 9 offers 20Gb of on-line storage rather than 2Gb and a years subscription to `Plus' downloadable content [Flash video help and templates] - but the 20Gb storage is for US users and with upload speeds being a fraction of download speeds not many would wish to use on-line storage anyway.
The old Elements tools are also there, like one step `teeth whitening' and `Sky more blue' tools streamlined to make colour, contrast and lighting adjustments even quicker [actually useful for old faded slide scans or to give your boss a fake tan and make them look ridiculous]. For editing you have a set of 'quickfix' options or you can load the full image editor for greater manual control: such as adjust sharpness, correct camera distortion, levels, hue and skin colour/tones. Standard tools include crop and adjust image size (pixels) and you can just edit selected areas of the photos using various object selection tools. Plus there are step-through guides [guided edit] to help you get there. The software will also integrate with scanners twain interfaces if you are into scanning film, and the Fill Light [shadow/highlight] tool is essential for bringing out detail in shadows from any slide/negative scan. Plus Elements can handle large RAW camera images. You can correct lens barrel distortion using the specific tool or various generic `Transform' tools. You can recompose [shrink] photos without loosing detail. Once installed Elements 9 auto-updates itself.
Elements 9 offers complex image database features [which work better than PhotoShops CS5's]. Although all this takes a while to do, within the photo-organiser you can now quick-edit images while viewing them and you can sync your photo collection across PCs to ensure the same photos are on all of them [useful for backup protection]. Plus you can add location information to the photo via Yahoo maps and satellite GPS if your camera supports it.
System requirements are similar to Elements 7: DVD drive, 1Gb RAM, XP, Vista or Windows 7, Mac 10.5.8+, 1.6GHz processor, 3.4Gb harddrive space, internet access, and a Direct-X9 16-bit graphics card. Those with a modern multi-core PC and 4Gb system RAM will find the program far more responsive though. Elements 9 perhaps isn't a crucial upgrade from Elements 8 or even 6, but for new home users, or those with older versions, it's very powerful photo editing and image database software from the market leaders. The new healing brush and layer masks are enough to convince me to upgrade to v9, but then my workplace pays for my copy [Adobe upgrade prices are steep].
Adobe Elements 9 has only two real competitors at the price: Paint Shop Pro X3 and Serif PhotoPlus X4 [worth investigating]. Professional users will head towards Adobe's semi-automated PhotoShop Lightroom 3.0 and the fantastically expensive Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended, although at work we have Adobe Elements 8/9 on a few imaging workstations for casual users, where the cost of PhotoShop CS5 Extended isn't justified. That said experienced Photoshop CS5 users will find Elements 9 lacking key features they are used to. Photoshop CS5 users won't find Elements 9 immediately easy to use; it's evolved into a very different program and it annoyingly hides identical tools in different menu locations.
Overall a useful and desirable update to Elements 8. Plus you can buy Photoshop Elements 9 as a cheap double pack with the excellent Adobe Premiere Elements 9 [video editing] - and Adobe offer educational discounts for schoolkids/teachers/students.
For upgraders - if you have anything up to Elements 7, there have been substantial changes since 7 and again, it's worth the cost. 8 included a lot of improvements and, while 9 adds only slightly to those, it's still worth going for the latest version. Again, buy it.
(Although in both cases, if you find a cheap source of Elements 8 as retailers try to de-stock, then by all means go for that - you won't be disappointed)
More difficulty comes if you have 8. Is it worth it? I'm not so sure. In hindsight, I wish I'd stuck to my usual software update rule of getting every other version - and since Adobe tend to upgrade annually, the wait wouldn't have been too long. (Note this is a PC based analysis - it may add more for mac users)
What it adds to 8 are basically (and this is a user's view rather than the complete corporate schpeel):
1. The biggy is layer masks. That makes a big difference and is what led me to splash out here. It's good to have, and makes a lot of tasks easier.
2. Context spot healer - nice idea, but far from problem free. Yes, it saves a little time in terms of healing and cloning, but not much. It works best on small areas - as you'd expect - and so the time saving is not great. It's nice to have rather than must have. [edit: of more use is the fact that you can now preview the clone stamp for more accurate alterations]
3. A few cosmetics, a few easier guided edits (the Lomo effect is nice and the portrait one, while adding nothing that you couldn't easily do before it is a nice, logical and simple walkthrough.
4. Faster links to Facebook. It didn't take much to upload to FB before, so again, that's a fairly minimal step forward. Again falls under the nice to have label.
I'm sure there are other tweaks that I've yet to uncover, but for me, if you are on Elements 8, the big issue is `do I want to pay the upgrade price for layer masks and a few other minor benefits?' (I suspect others will view the context spot healer more favourably than I have - it IS nice, but isn't the same as in the full CS suite. Check out product description for more upgrade features.
I'm sure others will give a more technically detailed review of this huge software kit - for me though, I upgraded for the layer masks - in truth I wish I'd waited until next year's update. Although in terms of time savings, it will probably pay it's way.
One other thought - the requirements are basically the same as for 8 but it does run noticeably slower on my computer. Certainly not unworkable, but be prepared. The more processing power you have to throw at this, the better.
Probably should have waited a few weeks before buying so they could iron out the bugs!
I am using it regularly and with the guidance of some of the expert advice available at my local camera... Read more
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