Amazon.co.uk Review
Photoshop Elements 2 sits between
Photoshop and
PhotoDeluxe and is ideal for anybody with a serious interest in digital imaging. It offers particularly good hand-holding for beginners.
Photoshop Elements is essentially the most widely used parts of Photoshop with tweaks to the interface to make them easier to use. It's designed mainly for retouching digital photographs, but has a number of natural media brushes too, so you can create your own images from scratch.
The key features of the program: the amount of assistance offered and the friendly nature of the interface. While there are many more tools available than in, say, PhotoDeluxe, the comprehensive help system and the Recipe Palette work together to provide an easy way into common tasks. These include retouching images, preparing them as Web graphics and sending pictures as e-mail attachments.
New additions to version 2 of Photoshop Elements start as soon as you choose to open a graphic file. The file browser now shows thumbnails of all readable files and provides details of their type and size. Double-click a thumbnail to open the file.
The Palette Well is a box set into the Shortcuts Bar that contains five separate, tabbed palettes, for things like filters and layers. Click on any tab and the palette detaches to float over the work area--click again and it re-docks in the well.
New tools include specialist facilities for varying colours to bring the best out of photos and new ways of producing finished images. It now provides an image stitching tool called Photomerge and a way of grabbing single frames from common video types, like MPEG, AVI, WMV and QuickTime.
Improved tools for creating Web images, include the ability to create Web galleries of your photos and automated adjustments which you can use to make photos suitable for Web transmission and display. Photoshop Elements 2 is ideal for the enthusiastic amateur or base-level professional graphics artist, who needs to work quickly and easily with photographic images. --Simon Williams
Manufacturer's Description
Photoshop Elements 2.0 lets you take advantage of powerful image-editing tools without professional training. Whether you shoot with a digital camera or scan traditional photos, you can quickly correct red eye and adjust lighting, contrast, and color. Automatically straighten and crop your pictures. Stitch together multiple shots to make seamless panoramas. Even capture individual frames from downloaded video files.Photoshop Elements works with your favorite e-mail program so you can automatically optimize and e-mail photos that download quickly and look great. Or easily feature your photos in a Web gallery using more than a dozen templates. And you can add GIF animations and cool buttons to your Web site. Inspirational Recipes show you how to perform editing techniques. Instantly apply frames, edges, and filter effects. Add artistic touches with amazingly realistic paintbrush effects. Have a collection of photos you want to show off? Create a PDF Slideshow that you can share with anyone on almost any device. You'll see exciting results right away thanks to hints, tutorials, a glossary, and other help features. Photoshop Elements makes digital imaging a breeze.
