Adobe’s latest version of its top-selling
consumer photo-editing program, Photoshop Elements 11, builds on and polishes
rather than overhauls this venerable application. Among the additions are a
revamped design, integrated Maps for locating your geo tagged photos, filters
that turn your photos into illustrations, and Guided Edits capable of producing
effects that would take major effort in the company’s industry-standard pro
photo tool, Photoshop CS6. Many small improvements combine to reaffirm
Photoshop Elements’ position as your top choice in consumer photo editing
software.
Adobe
Photoshop Elements 11
A better organizer
The first thing you’ll notice about
Photoshop Elements 11 is its simpler, cleaner look. From the welcome screen
forward, both the Organizer and the Editor put the focus where it most needs to
be: on your photos. For the former, four modes (Media, People, Places, and
Events) help you more intuitively sort and manage images, which you can then
perform simple tasks (fix contrast, color, or sharpness, remove red eye, and so
on) using the Instant Fix feature. Elements’ Auto-Analyzer can help you
identify photos most in need of touch-ups, but using it can take a while (so
don’t try it on thousands of photos at once).
When you’re importing photos you can
automatically fix red eyes and group similar images together, but the only
tagging option is to make the group name you’ve chosen for the set a tag. One
other stumble: Unlike other editing and organizing software, Elements separates
the media finding and importing steps, which is less elegant than I prefer.
Hitting the Maps choice in Organizer lets
you see where your photos were taken, as you may have guessed, on a map. I was
impressed that my GPS-tagged iPhone photos were automatically located
correctly, but if your photos have no GPS data embedded, you can manually place
them. A marker is placed on the map with the number of photos taken on the
spot. Clicking on the marker opens thumbnails of all photos from that location
in the right half of the program window. You can go the other way too: Choose a
folder of photos, and the map shows you their location. You can also simply
list the location in text.
A
better organizer
To get started with face tagging, simply
click on the big People mode button, and click the Add People button at the
bottom. Not only can Organizer find and identify faces in your digital photos
after you tag some of them with people’s names, but it can also now hook into
Facebook, download your friend list, and attach contacts’ names to photos.
Elements’ feature did a decent job if identifying more photos of the same
person, but it couldn’t handle profile views, and sometimes proposed persons of
the opposite gender (which was embarrassing) or failed to recognize the same
face in the same session. At one point, it even wanted me to identify a subway
warning sign clearly face recognition isn’t yet a perfect science.
As its name suggests, the Events mode lets
you group photos taken within a timeframe. Smart Events will create and
populate events for you (or you can do it yourself). You can group by date or
by a time, though there wasn’t enough control over how much time separates an
event’s photos. To the right, a calendar control lets you specify year, month,
and date to restrict event display. As in iPhoto, the nifty trick of “skimming”
lets you pass the mouse cursor over each event group to quickly riffle through
them.
Both
the Organizer and the Editor have received major changes to make them more
feature-rich and user-friendly
Editing and sharing
Photoshop Elements really comes into its
own when you move to the Editor. Like the Organizer, it’s been trimmed,
neatened, and adorned with mode buttons to better customize your experience:
Quick, Guided, and Expert in this case. The first two remain ideal for
beginners, breaking complex procedures down into simple pieces; new Guided
options in Elements 11 include High key (for a whitewashed portrait look), Low
Key (for black backgrounds), Vignette (for faded edges), and Tilt Shift for a
miniaturizing selective focus look.
Expert mode, on the other hand, offers
near-Photoshop control. Complete with filters (including new ones like Comic,
Graphic Novel, and Pen & Ink), layers, histograms, the ability to run
actions, and tons of artistic and graphics effects. Many of these give Elements
a strong Instagram feeling, but you have much more control over them here than
in that mobile app.
From its Create and Share panels, Photoshop
offers the most output options of any consumer photo editor whether you’re into
creating slideshows, sending picture emails, printing via Shutterfly, burning
disc, or uploading to Web galleries. You can directly upload to your favorite
online photo sites, including Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug, or Adobe’s own Revel
service. New for Elements 11 is direct upload to the creative video site Vimeo.
Photoshop
Elements 11 is loaded with editing tools to help you take full control over
your photos
It’s elementary
There are a couple of trip-ups in Elements
11. It doesn’t taken to Adobe’s support site, and your results could be from
other users, for different versions, and even different products. I wish Adobe
would make specific documentation for each product version, so that I knew a
topic search in Help was relevant to my product. This also means that if you
don’t have an active Internet connection, you can’t access help. There’s also
no native 64-bit version of the software, something that would be helpful as
cameras’ file size continue to grow.
If you’re mostly concerned about organizing
and doing interesting and creative things with your images but don’t want to
invest the time and money in learning Photoshop Elements’ array of dazzling
photo effects, organizational tools like face tagging and now geo tag maps, and
sharing and output options. Photoshop Elements 11’s tools for getting creating
with your digital images are unrivaled at the price.
Details
Price:
$99.99
value: 4/5
Pros: Lots
of powerful image manipulation tools. Strong face-and geo tagging now with
integrated maps. Excellent output options. Offers good help with performing
advanced edits.
Cons:
separates organizer app is less integrated than that of other photo apps.
Help system scattered. Not native 64-bit.
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