Adobe Photoshop Elements 2

This edition of Photoshop 'Lite' offers home users exceptional value for money.

Price: £88.13

Manufacturer: Adobe

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Verdict

Pros:

File browser
Selection brush
Extensive feature set
Great price

Cons: Multiphoto on single-page printing disappointing

OverallAll the most common functions of Photoshop at a fraction of the price - this is the only sensible choice for the serious home-user

Nik Rawlinson., Personal Computer World 27 Aug 2002

Elements borrows from the full-blown Photoshop in more than just name. Splash-screen aside, one of the first things you'll encounter is the file browser. This powerful addition first reared its head in Photoshop 7, and not only lets you organise and rotate images, much as Windows does, but also has powerful batch-renaming functions and can examine Exif (exchangeable image file) data.

As with the original Elements, Adobe is gearing version 2 more towards the home user than the professional, which explains the Quick Fix dialogue box. This groups many of the exposure adjustments found on the Image menu and, while not replacing them, it at least gives them a friendly face.

There's also a red-eye brush that returns corneas to their natural colour without tainting the iris. More impressive is the selection brush, through which you can paint a selection area, avoiding the use of the arbitrary marquee, or clumsy magic wand. Try it once, and you'll never be able to give it up.

This goes some way to making up for the loss of Photoshop's extract filter, but the omission of that one tool alone could still be enough to encourage more power-hungry users to jump straight to full-blown Photoshop and skip this release altogether.

Elements does, however, incorporate Photoshop 7's painting engine, allowing you to take existing brush styles and remodel them, tweaking fade, colour jitter, hardness and even the angle at which each lays down a stroke on the canvas.

There is still plenty here to interest photographers, too. One of the most useful functions is the Fill-In Flash, which will lighten underexposed foreground elements while retaining existing levels within the background - something the regular brightness control would never manage.

Once you're happy with your photos, there's every chance you'll want to put them online, which naturally leads to image optimisation - reducing the file size so they download quicker. Although Image Ready only ships with the full Photoshop, Elements 2 includes several of its functions, making it quick and easy to slim down your files. It doesn't include image slicing or rollover creation, so it's not a fully fledged web creation tool, but then you're not paying for that.

A few functions could do with a little polish, such as the picture packager, which prints multiple photos on a single page. By default it will lay out multiple copies of the same image on the page, rather than all the images in your workspace, or all images in a selected folder - you have to manually swap out the duplicates you don't want. Once you've selected your images, changing the configuration - swapping from two 5 x 7in to four 4 x 5in images, for example - resets the selection to multiple copies of the original image.

We would have liked more size options, too - on an 11 x 17in page you are forced to print two images at 5 x 7in, six at 3 x 3.5in and eight at an eye-straining 2 x 2.5in. You're out of luck if you want to fit on two 10 x 8in pictures.

To let a buying decision be swayed by one disappointment, though, would be a crime, and you'd miss out on what is an otherwise excellent package.

As well as the Quick Fix dialogue and extensive brush-tweaking options, Elements also allows you to extract pages from pdf documents and generate Acrobat slideshows. As a result, this 'lite' version of Photoshop is extremely useful for novices, while remaining in the home-user price band.

If you can't afford Photoshop but want file compatibility and all but the most esoteric of functions, Elements 2 is definitely worth a look.

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