Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 Review

Written by Heidi Schmutzler, Paul Schmutzler, and Tim Siglin
October 30, 2007

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, recently released by Adobe for the Windows platform and offered as a stand-alone product or bundled with Adobe Premiere Elements 4, is the company’s newest release of a consumer-centric product. Elements 6 offers tried and true photo editing capabilities any user will appreciate, along with several new and impressive professional level tools.

One of the first things that struck us was the look and feel of Elements 6. Mimicking user interfaces from the new Creative Suite 3 line of professional products, Elements’ is not only easier on the eyes but also allows for more accurate color and brightness adjustments.

For the basic user, Elements features tools such as layered editing. For the average PC user, this can be a real life saver. Say, for instance, they applied the rippled water effect to Aunt Jane’s face five minutes ago and forgot to undo it. While this would be a problem with the photo editing tools in Windows XP or Vista, Elements offers multiple levels of undo to get Aunt Jane’s face back to its normal radiant self.

Another basic but invaluable feature in Elements is the ability to auto enhance photos in their entirety, or spot correct as needed. For a simple fix, the auto enhancements save time and produce satisfactory results, retaining the ability to undo the changes.

A third feature is the editing “guided” mode or wizard that offers all the basic photo editing features in a step-by-step format. Each stage can be selected or skipped by the user, and each can be individually undone easily. Every category offers an layman’s explanation of what each adjustment will do to the picture. In our tests, the guides or wizard for the skin tone corrector and lighten/darken adjuster worked most consistently.

For the quasi-professional photo editor, Elements includes many professional grade capabilities one might only expect to find in CS2 or CS3 Photoshop. Masking, adjustment layers, camera distortion correction, and an extensive array of brushes and patterns are items that usually require the purchase of a professional Photoshop version.

Not only has Elements changed its skin, kept the basics intact and provided selected pro-level tools, but it also added several new features.

Photomerge is a feature imported from Photoshop CS3 and CS3 Extended. If portions of two pictures would look better together, Elements will blend portions of the two pictures together, blurring the seams in such a way as to appear almost as if the pictures were actually taken as one image rather than “Photoshopped” as many professionals describe the process.

The Faces feature is similar to “Photomerge,” but it relates directly to replacing the faces of individuals in the picture. This tool allows you to take two group shots where one or more people aren’t looking at the camera or have their eyes closed and eliminate just small portions of the picture, around the faces, to allow a face from one photo to replace the same face from the other.

Create makes it easy to use your photos to design calendars, online galleries, slide shows, greeting cards, and more. And, in a nod to online interactivity, Adobe incorporates Flash by allowing the user to create some very cool online Flash galleries with your photos. The best part: no Actionscripting or programming required.

Organizer offers superb features for helping users keep their JPEGs wrangled. All of the photos imported into the organizer are automatically tagged from the metadata built into the file, while still allowing you to create custom tags for each photo. One of our favorite features is what’s called “face tagging.” A separate window will open showing all of the faces that Elements discovers in your photos. Just create a tag for Mom and drag all of her faces to that tag. Voila, all of Mom’s photos are now quickly filtered by clicking on her tag!

Share allows the user to email attachments, burn their photos to a disk, make a PDF slide show, or send some to a cell phone. The Photo Mail feature can automatically resize picture(s) to be sent to those on lower bandwidth connections; it also offers some creative templates to choose from and uses the address book from Outlook, vCards, or Outlook Express.

In summary, Photoshop Elements 6 has some tremendous advantages over the integrated products in Windows XP or Vista, and raises the bar for other consumer photo editing applications. Elements offers a fine mix of professional power and consumer simplicity that make it a great deal for any photographer.

Originally published here.