Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 7: Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 6 for the Macintosh

PSA Journal, Dec, 2008 by Stan Ashbrook

Adobe[R] Photoshop[R] Elements 7

Adobe[R] Photoshop[R] Elements 6 for the Macintosh

Available from Adobe[R] Systems

www.adobe.com

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Photoshop Elements 7 is available for Microsoft Windows XP or Vista

Price: $99.99; Upgrade from a previous

version: $79.99

Photoshop Elements 7 with Plus Membership is $139.99 with an upgrade price of $119.99

Photoshop Elements 6 is available for the Macintosh, $89.99 with upgrade price of $69.99

The user will first notice the Welcome screen is different and that it introduces Photoshop.com, which is Adobe's entry to online photo sharing. See Figure 1. Photoshop.com was originally released as Photoshop Express Beta and is free from the Adobe website. The Basic version provides 2 GB of online sharing and image editing.

The Plus version is now available in Photoshop Elements 7. Photoshop. com Plus* membership extends the capabilities of Elements software with ongoing delivery of tutorials, artwork, and templates and 20GB of online storage that allows the photographer to access their photos and videos virtually anywhere. This promises to be a fun, interactive photo-sharing experience for friends and family. Photoshop Elements 7 makes it easy to create and share online albums and automatically back them up and synchronize them with Elements 7 Organizer.

Adobe listened to their customers who complained about the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 dark interface. Now in the Elements 7 Preferences the user can change the interface brightness. See Figure 2.

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In Organizer photos can now be found by doing a text search. Of course this depends on creating useful tags when bringing photos into the Organizer.

In Editor most of the tools are the same as in v6 but a new tool has been added called the Smart Brush that allow enhancements to be painted into photos quickly and easily. This tool can be a lot of fun to experiment with. The really hot new tool is the Scene Cleaner to quickly clean your scene of unwanted elements. Many times a photographer wants to photograph a subject but pedestrians or cars distract from the scene in each shot taken. Now if multiple photos are taken the Adobe Photomerge[R] Scene Cleaner can simply brush away any elements that changed positions between photos and create a composite with just the look wanted.

There is a new filter in the Filter menu called Surface Blur that smoothes out various parts but keeps edges crisp. This is a great filter for portraits.

The Guided Edit Panel is a great help to beginners to image editing and in Photoshop Elements 7 Adobe has enhanced some existing tools and added new categories to the Guided Edit panel. One of which is an Action Player that allows the playing of a Photoshop Action on the open photo. Elements 7 includes some action sets and you can add your own but it is expected there will be many more to take advantage of this new feature. Another new category is the Photographic Effects that make it easy to quickly turn a photo into a work of art through some simple step-by-step instructions.

Stan Ashbrook, FPSA

Review Editor