Adobe Photoshop Elements 10
5 stars
$99.99 including VAT
www.adobe.com/uk
Photoshop Elements is now 10 years
old. Considering an over-impressive version, it’s not surprising when Adobe
often struggled to improve it each year. The last update is the exception, with
Layer masks disclose many advanced technology and Guide mode helps normal users
achieve complicated effects by taking advantage of resulting wizards. Can
version 10 keep this pace?
The number of new features comes out
in Organize module. Object Search enables users to specify an object in the
image, while it scans the rest of the gallery to find examples of the same
object. It’s just theory though. We let it scan 37000 photos in our gallery,
but after a lot hours of importing and making lists (and changed all files,
stopped our increasing backup route), it couldn’t bring any appropriate images.
There are other ways to search and filter images, but there are no containing
folder names – an important shortage.
The face protection shown in version 8
has been strengthened by the integration with Facebook; download friends’ names
to link tagged uploads to their Facebook accounts. It’s a great feature, but it
doesn’t know that family members often have the same surname.
Organizer has some excellent qualities
but it can’t compete with Google Picasa – quicker and more efficient.
Nevertheless, you can use Picasa for managing your pictures and Photoshop
Elements for editing – which they can do best. When editing color tools of
Picasa are fundamental and Raw processing is quite poor, Photoshop Elements is
good at both.
Most improvements for main
applications are the extension of existing features. Smart Brush Tool has more
brushes, apply the complex process such as colour tints, oil pastel effect and
rain effect by simple brushes.
Guided Tab consists of many new tasks,
such as focus slightly or polaroid appearance for an image. Our favorite among
new addition is Depth of Field, which blurs the image while keeping selected
areas sharp – it is useful skill to imitate the shallow depth of field of SLR.
We had a headache to edit the area we
want to keep the sharpness by using Quick Selection, an option bringing us to
Lasso tool will be better. People who know how to use Layer masks can change
the results with any tools they choose, but because Guided mode exists in its
own field, it doesn’t illustrate how techniques are used to modify or transfer
to other tasks.
Now you can make the text follow in a
curve. It includes drawing a curve and typing, and the curve can be edited
later by dragging the nodes. The text can take the edge of simple shapes such
as ellipse and triangle, or an area you can choose with Quick Selection brush.
However, characters which follow too closely the selection, while curves
tighten in hand-made strokes, make letters stick to each other and become hard
to read, and there’s no control to delete spaces to solve this problem.
This is not the must-have update for
version 9, and if users consider the upgrade fee - £69 of
Adobe, they should stop. Nevertheless, it is not weaker than version 9. To edit
photos, nothing else in this price can compare with Photoshop Elements about
its power and accuracy and it’s really interesting to use, so it deserves
another Best Buy Award.
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Summary
Evaluation. We can love new features
or not, but there’re no competitors who can equal the remarkable ability to
edit photos of Elements.
Editing image software. Windows XP
(SP2)/Vista/7, 1.6GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 3 GB of disk space.
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