Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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133 of 136 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazingly good value for money, 21 April 2009
I switched to Photoshop Elements 7 from Corel Paint Shop Pro X, mainly because most of the digital photography textbooks that I have been reading (and their attached tutorial DVDs) seem to use Photoshop Elements as their photo manipulation programme of choice. I was also looking for a programme a little more advanced than Corel Paint Shop Pro. Photoshop Elements is not for the faint hearted. It is a big, powerful aid to photo manipulation that contains lots of hidden depths, and ideally you need some training to get the best out of it.
That said, for most elementary tasks the software is straightforward enough, and it makes a doddle of jobs such as red-eye correction, image rotation, cropping, and sharpening. Side-by-side "before and after" images greatly simplify the task of applying changes in lighting and colour. Entering text on the image is remarkably easy in comparison with Paint Shop Pro, and the clone stamp tool seems a lot more effective in Photoshop Elements than in other photo manipulation programmes that I have tried. Photoshop Elements allows the user to quickly magnify the image almost to individual pixel level, and this allows images to be altered with as much subtlety as the user desires. There is a huge Adobe user's guide available as a downloadable PDF file, and there are plenty of tutorials available free of charge on the Internet.
I found Photoshop Elements easy to install on my very basic Asus Barebones desktop computer. It opens up quickly, runs smoothly, and doesn't seem to have had the slightest effect on the computer's speed or efficiency. One is frequently aware of the programme's very considerable hidden potential, lying just below the surface. With the assistance of tutorials, I have already enjoyed exploring some of this potential, and I look forward, when time permits, to further experimentation. In short, amazingly good value for the price, and highly recommended.
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733 of 768 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great photo editing package for home users, 6 Sep 2008
Presently on PcPro's `A-List', Adobe Elements is a cut down version of Adobe's £500+ Photoshop/Photoshop Extended CS4, and costs considerably less while still having a lot of useful photo editing capabilities. Photoshop CS4 has a steep learning curve, but Photoshop elements is far more home-user friendly. A lot of the program is geared towards image storage and management of the photos on your hard drive, helping with emailing, web output and scrapbooks of your images. The program can auto-downloads your images from the camera to folders, set up using the date, and can even process the images, say 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, preferring the simplicity of logical folder names instead. Also, like PhotoShop, the image database side isn't seamlessly integrated into the image editing side [to the point where it's actually annoying]. The trendy charcoal 'white text on grey' interface is also style over function, you find it harder to read than black text on white, and more importantly to tell which photo window is active - professional PhotoShop CS3 users are far better served with standard Windows colours.
New to Elements 7 is a new Quick Fix tool to soften surfaces while keeping the edge and detail sharp - i.e. a blur tool, which can help to remove unwanted image noise. Plus there's a new Scene Cleaner tool that can brush away undesirable objects from a photo [so you can ditch that car or tourists from the view] and there's now a Smart Brush which lets you instantly apply effects to a selected area of the image. Plus Element's 7 sports a new single step `whiten teeth', 'make grass greener' and `make the sky blue' tool - but this is little more than streamlining tools within Quick Select and Adjustment Layer Presets that were available on Elements 6. Besides Adobe's suggestion of using the tool to whiten teeth and add a suntan to say Aunt Doris's face may make her look a little ridiculous. Also new in Element's 7 will be a free subscription to Photoshop.com, a special service Adobe has devised to bring friends together by providing quick access to on-line backup, storage, and sharing capabilities. You get 2GB of on-line storage, `enough for up to 1,500 photos', so you can view your photos from virtually anywhere. Thus Photoshop Elements goes `Facebook', allowing you to share your photos `in fun, interactive ways via invitation-only'. For these `Online Albums' you will get new [quite fun] animated templates delivered to Elements on a regular basis. There will also be a Photoshop.com ` Plus' membership offering 20 Gb [15,000 photos] of on-line photo storage, but that will require you paying an annual fee. The first year's 20 Gb subscription is included in Adobe's `Elements 7 Plus' [but not this standard version].
And all the old Element 6's tools are there as well. 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. Naturally you have standard tools like crop and adjust image size (pixels) as well. 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 pretty essential for bringing out detail in shadows from any slide/negative scan. Plus Elements can handle RAW camera images, although I use TIFF/jpg (Elements can save in any common image format).
System requirements are quite high: CD drive, 1Gb system RAM, XP or Vista, 2GHz processor, and a Direct-X 9 graphics card [and Adobe installers can reject systems that don't meet the minimum spec]. Elements 7 perhaps isn't a crucial upgrade from Elements 6 or even 5, 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 'Scene Cleaner' tool should have been the 'killer app' for those considering upgrading, but it is little more than Elements 6's old PhotoMerge Group application and it requires a series of photos where one has the background free to copy across [and it sometimes gets the exposure wrong making the added bit look rather obvious].
Adobe Elements 7 has only two real competitors at the price: Paint Shop Pro X2 and Serif PhotoPlus X2. Both these programs are also excellent and worthy of consideration, with PhotoPlus's strength being it's about as powerful but rather cheaper to buy and upgrade. Likewise Corel Paint Shop pro X2 occasionally offers a bit more than Elements [layer masks, and curves], is also cheaper and a tad easier to use, although it can be buggy [not Adobe's strong point on first version release either - so install those patches]. Professional users and some SLR enthusiasts will still head towards Adobe's semi-automated PhotoShop Darkroom 2.0 and the fantastically expensive Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended, although even at work we have Adobe Elements on a few imaging workstations for casual users, where the high cost of PhotoShop CS4 Extended simply isn't justified. That said experienced Photoshop CS4 users will rapidly find Elements 7 lacking in a few key features they are used to.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 is also available to buy as a cheaper double pack with the new Adobe Premiere Elements 7 video editing software, which should be even better value than this upgrade. Plus this double pack qualifies for a large educational discount for non-commercial use if you, or a child in the house, are in full time education [from primary school to college]. Similar large educational discounts apply to much of Adobes software. Those buying for College/School department use will save even more.
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58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
What's new in this version?, 26 May 2009
I have been buying and using Elements since it first came out. There were huge differences between v1 and v2 and between v2 and v4 - but versions 5 and 7 (perhaps it's the odd numbers?) are in between versions with no real enhancements to shout about. Yes, Version 7 has a different splash screen heralding its features - but I cannot see any real substantive improvement on version 6.
Version 6 introduced the grey/black interface - making screen shots for tutorial materials very difficult to print and often difficult to read. This is continued in v7 and I wish they would give a retro option to revert to a white background.
Also for some strange reason the use of the zoom via a mouse wheel is not default and has to switched on in Options - rather strange.
Of course it is still good value - but not if you have Version 6 - or even version 5. It might be worth looking for an earlier version second hand than going for this release.
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