 Adobe Photoshop Elements 5
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What is it? Image editing software for Windows
We clicked with: The Quick Edit, Organiser, the help centre and the Auto Functions
Shots in the dark: None really!
Our quick verdict: More features than you could shake a stick at and at under £60 from the internet it's very good value
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Links: Read other
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Editor's introduction
Andy Lane had always boasted that whatever anyone could do in Photoshop, she could do I Paint Shop Pro. I always told her that as soon as she tried Photoshop she'd be hooked. When a copy of Photoshop Elements turned up it was too good an opportunity to miss - I asked her to look at it through the eyes of somebody who had never edited their pictures before. Here's what she learned.
Version note: Andy reviewed Photoshop Elements 5 on the PC. It will not be available for the Mac until early 2007 and although the editor is very similar, many of the extra media functions aren't available in PSE 4 for Mac yet.
Getting Started
The first thing you see when you fire up Photoshop Elements 5.0 is the welcome screen:
Opening Screen
If you are new to photography editing software then take a quick look at the tutorials from the link at the top left. Go on the quick tour for a good overview of what you can do in Photoshop Elements 5.0.
As Easy as ABC
I decided to start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to start (Too much Maria watching, sorry!) I opened up Elements in Edit mode and connected my D80 to my pc. The download dialogue box popped up as soon as it detected my camera.
Download Screen
Here you get a chance to decide how your photographs are downloaded. I chose 'After Copying, Verify and Delete Originals'. It was all very clear and other than the one change I left everything else as standard.
Once they'd downloaded Elements 5 brought up the Organiser Page. It shows only the photos that you have recently downloaded.
Organiser
Get Organised
Photoshop Elements 5 allows you to 'tag' your photographs so that you can easily find them by searching by a particular tag and some photographers will mark their photos as soon as they download them with a star rating. From 1 star being 'delete and don't tell anyone you took such a rubbish photograph' to 3 stars being 'Hmm, not sure, I'll look at that one again' to 5 stars 'Hey I've got a winner, keep it'. You can set a number of tags if your photo falls into lots of categories like, kids, Christmas, Santa!
Fancy Features
There are loads of fancy things you can do under the Create menu item. Take your pick from Photo Galleries, CD covers, Calendars etc.
Create
While you are in the Organiser, choose the photos you want then choose your menu item from the Create menu. If you choose Slideshow then a dialogue box pops up with various options for you to choose.
Slideshow
Make your changes and click on ok. The next page lets you add various effects to your slideshow and how you want to output it. It's simple to follow and you can get some funky effects. The other options in the create menu are just as easy to use.
Make Changes
Of course the real power of Photoshop Elements lies in its editing abilities. It allows you to easily make changes to your photographs. When you've decided which photograph you want to work on you can go straight to Edit | Full Edit or Edit | Quick Fix. Whichever one you choose you can quickly get to the other once the photo is opened as Elements 5.0 uses tabbed pages.
Editor
If you've looked at the Quick Tour as I suggested at the beginning then you'll know that Elements can apply some quick fixes to colour, contrast, etc. If you're happy with what Elements has done then you can just save and print your photograph. If you're not quite happy with it then you can click on the Full Edit tab and make some further adjustments.
Using the lily photograph I decided to try to do what I might do if I was using my normal editing package. (Without reading the manual).
Colour Me White
I thought that the white balance was wrong on my lily photo. Ok, so I want to change something, so looking at the menu Enhance seemed like a good place to start. Adjust Color | Remove Color Cast. Ah that's what I want.
Colour Cast
I followed the instructions (use dropper to click on white, grey or black) and it did a very competent job.
A Bit of Topiary
Next I decided to crop the leaves out of the picture. If this is your first time using an editing package then you may not know what the crop icon looked like (it's on the toolbar to the left) but you can easily search the menu under Image and find Crop there. It has an icon on the menu too so you will know what it looks like next time. If you point to the icons on the toolbar on the right a hot tip pops up. Click on the blue hyperlink and you get to the Help Centre which explains what the feature does. All of these make it extremely easy to get going with Photoshop Elements but when you're ready there are a ton of shortcuts to speed things up.
Under the dropdown box Aspect Ratio are various 'usual' crop sizes I chose 'no restriction'. I dragged the sides to the shape I wanted and clicked on the tick to apply.
Pretty Sharp Looking
The lily photo was looking pretty good. Just a little sharpening… Now if I was someone completely new to fixing photos I would look in Enhance. Sure enough, at the bottom of Elements Enhance menu is Unsharp Mask (surely I wouldn't want that?) and Adjust Sharpness. Since the name of “Unsharp Mask” is a bit offputting, I chose Adjust Sharpness. Up pops the next screen.
Adjust Sharpness
What the heck does that mean? How much do I need to change the settings? So I clicked on Learn more about: Adjust Sharpness. The Elements help screen comes up and you can read about how to change the settings and some handy hints. At the bottom of this page there is Unsharp Mask and that is where you will learn that actually Unsharp Mask means the opposite and perhaps that's what you should use after all! I go back to the Enhance menu and play about with Unsharp Mask until I am happy with the clarity of my photo.
Fuzzy Logic
Now the lily is nice and sharp but so is my background. My 'signature' wallpaper is showing more too. How can I blur it so it doesn't show? I decided to use the search at the right of the menu bar.
Blur
I typed in Blur Background and hit return.
Blur Edges Help
I looked through the help and decided on Blur the edges of a selection by feathering. I picked the magnetic selector (it looks like a wire coat hanger with a magnet). I found that a bit tricky and had to mess about deselecting where it had been a bit enthusiastic but I managed to do it in about 5 minutes, so not too bad. I inversed the selection so that only my background was selected and I feathered it by 1 pixel. I chose Filter | Blur | Guassian Blur from the Menu and applied a 25 pixel blur by moving the slider until I had the desired effect.
Yep, I liked that. So I saved it using File | Save As and choosing the standard options calling it Lily.
Let ThinkCamera Help You
I thought it might look good with a border so I followed Jonathan's tutorial Technique: Present Your Pictures and added a sympathetic border.
I'm pleased with the finished photograph so I used the option File | Save for Web to save it as a gif to display on this page.
Lily Finished
Our Verdict
As someone who has used a photo editing package before I found Photoshop Elements 5.0 quite easy to use. The help files are good although it takes a bit of flitting from one help page to another to find exactly how to do something. Someone new to using an editing package should find it useful straight away using the Quick Edit system. For those who want to make more subtle or different changes to their photographs the full edit mode is also quite easy to find their way around. There are more features than you could shake a stick at and at under £60 from the internet it's good value. With all the tutorials on Think Camera and those you can find in many photography magazines no one should struggle.
