Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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229 of 232 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ideal digital photo tool, 18 Nov 2007
I had the full version of Photoshop loaded on my last PC and it was thoroughly wasted on me. The majority of the features were unnecessary for photo adjustments and it took ages to open and close the program. I also did not like having a separate program running as a file browser. This made it slower and more cumbersome still.
In contrast, this fairly basic program is easy to use and apart from the shortage of ready-made picture frames, it enables you to transform photographs in all the ways I could think of. I have used the `guided' adjustments to very good effect. I invariably need to the alter the brightness of my photos and it's possible to apply this to the darker parts of the image only without ruining overall clarity. In the past, I've selected a darkish area of the picture manually and the transformation results have been fairly mediocre in comparison.
The worst aspect of the program is the fact that it does not recognise the old folders you've probably placed your files in. Instead, it puts all photos into one massive folder and then you need to apply tags to individual photos or make up whole new sets of folders. Rather than mess around with this, I've tended to sort all my pictures into date order and leave them in the folders I started with.
Thoroughly recommended. Its only rival for the money is Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, which is similarly good value for money; more labour-intensive, but easier to browse around.
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95 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great package and a try before buy is available, 21 Feb 2008
While good to get you going, the photo and video packages often bundled with PCs etc really don't give you anything advanced and easy to use (I mean the budget editions that usually cost about £25 to buy separately).
So after deciding that I no way need the mega-functionality of professional packages (even if I could afford splashing out several hundred pounds!) I looked into reviews from a number of different sources on a couple of mid-range packages but the only way to really know is to try one out first before buying.
Adobe have a try-before-buy scheme for stuff like this on their website (the Pro versions and the Elements versions of PhotoShop and Premier are available) although the file downloads are naturally very big. It was after trying these that made me buy the Premier Elements 4.0 and Photoshop 6.0 bundle.
I spent pretty much a whole weekend with the trial version (which is fully featured with a 30day timeout) editing holiday photos and video clips trying out various features - they're really quite intuitive to use and (so far) I haven't had any of the crashes that others have experienced so for me it gets a thumbs up.
Surprisingly, ordering from Amazon was a couple of pounds cheaper than buying the unlock codes direct from Adobe and also gets you the installation DVD and manuals. Note though that you have to uninstall the downloaded time-limited version and then reinstall from the disk as the licence codes with the disk won't unlock the downloaded time-limited version.
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372 of 380 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you can't afford Photoshop Extended this is one of the best choices for image editing and photo storage, 15 Oct 2007
Presently on PcPro's `A-List', this is a cut down version of Adobe's £500+ Photoshop/Photoshop Extended CS3, and costs considerably less while still having a lot of useful photo editing capabilities. Photoshop CS3 has a steep learning curve, but not so Photoshop elements. Elements is far more home-user friendly and a lot of the program is geared towards image storage and management of the photos on your hard drive. It also helps you with emailing, web output and scrapbooks of your images. The program auto-downloads your images from the camera to folders, set up using the date, and can process the images, automatically removing red-eye, while it does it. Using stacks you can set up image databases [smart albums] using keywords like names, places, events, etc.., and you can even search using visual tags within the image. That said, I shun the image database options offered by Photoshop Elements and Extended, prefering the simplicity of logical folder names instead.
PhotoShop Elements 6 now looks good with it's graphite-colour interface. For editing you have a set of quickfix tools or you can load the full image editor for greater manual control: such as adjust sharpness, correct camera distortion, levels, hue and skin colour. Naturally you have standard tools like crop and adjust image size (pixels) as well. With Elements v6.0 you can now do things like brush away wrinkles with the spot healing/healing brush, use clone overlays, make improved B&W images, add image vibrance and clarity, make composite pictures, copy and even blend parts from different images (to say swap faces from a series of photo's so that all your kids are smiling at the camera in one image). You also get a layers palette for composites, shapes, text effects and frames. Plus there are step-through guides [guided edit] to help you get there. Some Adobe Elements on-line help is as obtuse as ever, but Elements simplicity makes this far less of a problem than with the full Photoshop [also see help.adobe.com, photoshopelementsuser.com & adobe.com].
The software will also integrate with scanners twain interfaces if you are into scanning film, and the Fill Light [shadow/highlight] tool is pretty essential for bringing out detail in shadows from any slide/negative scan. Plus Elements can handle RAW camera images, although I use TIFF (Elements can save in any common image format). If you want something a bit more like old Photoshop 7 have a look at Serif PhotoPlus 11.0 as it's great value with cheap upgrades, and runs on anything from Windows 98SE to XP - plus it takes Photoshop plug-ins. There's also limited but freebie Google Picasso and Corel's excellent Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 to consider. Otherwise Elements is a great bit of image editing/database software from the main player in the market (Adobe). It's well worth upgrading from older versions of Elements that may be bundled in with cameras & scanners. See Adobe.com for upgrade details, it's often £10 cheaper to upgrade rather than buy the full licence, unless Amazon is offering it discounted on the day. The only downside with Elements 6 is that it's XP/Vista only. If you have an older PC OS or a tight budget try ebay/Amazon rellers for older versions of Elements that will be going cheap - v5 is XP/Vista, v4 or v3 is XP/2000 and v2 is NT, 98, ME, XP, 2000. As with any editing software, a lot of memory (2Gb) and a fast processor really speeds things up with large photos but a modest processor (1.3GHz + 256 RAM) will work OK with v6.0 if you are a rather patient sort - and have XP. Don't go below this minimum system requirement for v6.0 though - Adobe installers often reject any PC that falls below their minimum specification.
So, overall Photoshop Elements 6 a great bit of software, although perhaps it's not a crucial upgrade from Elements 5. However, those also into video and PC video editing should seriously consider the sister program Adobe Premiere Elements that does the same for Video - and more importantly you can buy these two as a twin pack at reduced cost (checkout adobe.com and Amazon). If you think your school age kids (primary school-kid to university student) would benefit from this Photoshop Elements 6.0 & Premiere Elements 4.0 twin pack you can get them a home-use only licenced Student copy for under £80 (see Adobe.com). Similar Educational discounts apply to all Adobe products (e.g. Photoshop Extended and Creative Suites).
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