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Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements 10

Other Top Features

In addition to the new options mentioned previously, Photoshop Elements 10 retains the wonderful features offered in PS Elements 9. Among my favorites are:

Image Intelligence
The Spot Healing Brush uses image intelligence borrowed from Photoshop CS5 to analyze what's in an image and quickly de clutter or repair photos. For instance, quickly get rid of an ugly garbage can, car or other object with a wipe of a brush, and the background will amazingly be filled in like the object was never there. This is a very cool feature and a must-have.

Photomerge Style Match
It analyzes characteristics of any image, such as color tone, and applies them to another photo, so in essence you can replicate any photo style.

Recompose Photo Tool
This is a nifty tool that lets you automatically resize or change the orientation of photos without distorting key parts. In other words, you can choose which elements of a photo you want to keep and which ones to get rid of. Say you have a horizontal picture of two people and you want to make it vertical. You can select the elements and bits of background you want to keep and which ones to eliminate without distorting the people or background.

AutoFix Tools
The AutoFix Tools -- Smart Fix, Contrast, Tone, Color, Red Eye and Detail -- in the Organizer that can take care of common fixes. Other one-step tools include Touch Up Brushes for teeth whitening and making the sky bluer, and simultaneously selecting an area and applying an effect with one brush stroke. If you need more complex editing, without leaving Organizer you can switch over to Elements' full edit interface, which has icons and moveable, resizable tool panels.

Organization

Photoshop Elements is actually composed of two programs, an extremely powerful image editor and an organizer. Many tasks can be done in the Organizer mode, including most common edits; for more complex edits you can switch over to the editor.

The Auto Analyzer automates searching and assigns tags based on characteristics and quality such as lighting and focus. Apply Smart tags to photos as you import them. Smart tags identify images by quality, focus, contrast, exposure, the number of faces etc. Use a Tag Cloud to quickly find images with the most popular tags.

The People Recognition feature assigns people tags. As you identify people within photos, the program learns to recognize them. The more you identify them the better the software gets at recognizing them, even with other hairstyles or with or without sunglasses.

At the heart of the Organizer is the capability of putting your images into albums and tagging them. The more you adopt this system, the easier it will be to use the sharing service, which uploads images album by album rather than image by image. However, if you just want to upload a couple of images you can put them into their own album. The synchronization capability is quite handy. If you make a change to an album on your desktop, the change will automatically be made in your online version. You can set your sharing to be private or public and automatically send invitations from MS Outlook. The backup system works by backing up your albums, not every individual image on your hard drive.

Sharing
You can share photos pretty much everywhere. Post directly to Facebook, create unique interactive online albums, upload directly to YouTube.

Synchronize your photo and video clips between multiple computers. Elements lets you share your images or creations via iPhone, email, web/TV. Adobe offers a free basic membership to their online service, Photoshop.com that gives you 2GB storage, interactive sharing and access to your photos from anywhere. The Photoshop Plus Membership includes ongoing delivery of tutorials, artwork and templates, interactive photo sharing, access to your photos and videos from any computer, and 20 GB of online storage and automatic backup for a yearly fee.

Creative Projects
Create scrapbook pages, photo books, calendars, DVD labels, photo cards and more. A helpful new feature is the hugely flexible workspace which allows users to automatically place photos in a photo book template and access any Photoshop Elements editing feature from within the photo book layout mode. Elements has professionally designed clip art, templates, and themes. You can get additional templates with the Plus membership that are automatically delivered to your desktop.

How Does Photoshop Elements Compare to Photoshop, Photoshop Extended or Adobe Lightroom?

Created for folks who are new to digital photo editing, Photoshop Elements offers robust yet easy-to-use features that assist you in organizing, editing, creating, sharing and protecting your image collection. Photoshop is professional level software for designing powerful images, and Photoshop Extended features everything in Photoshop plus tools for creating and editing 3D and motion-based images. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom deals with the workflow needs of pro photographers and serious photo hobbyists, allowing them to import, process, organize, and display big collections of digital images.

Should you Buy or Upgrade to Photoshop Elements 10?

Photoshop Elements 10 remains one of the top choices in image-editing and organizing software, with extremely robust editing and at under $100 it is reasonably priced for the vast array of advanced features. Guided tutorials can walk beginners through editing projects and advanced users will appreciate the sophisticated tools without the cost of buying Photoshop. It is a great choice for those looking for a photo editor and organizer for the first time or if you have an older version of PS Elements, (earlier than 9) you may want to upgrade, mainly to get the wonderful features of version 9. Otherwise, I see this as a minor upgrade without enough new features to make the price of the upgrade worthwhile for most people.