Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 Review

Photoshop Elements 11 available now

Today, Adobe is announcing the newest version of their consumer imaging software, Adobe Elements 11.  With the new version comes the usual number of refreshed and all-new effects, guided edits, and workflow tweaks, but it also brings some major changes as well as a completely overhauled interface.  Read on to see what’s new as well as my opinion on the importance of this upgrade.

Elements 11 sports a completely overhauled lighter interface.

INTERFACE AND SPEED

The first and most obvious update to the Elements 11 suite is the interface.  Adobe has moved from a mostly black backdrop to a mixture of medium and light grays. This seems like a step backwards and against the direction the company has been taking with their professional Creative Suite products.  Although there is an adjustment slider in all of the CS apps to adjust interface brightness, it’s obvious from the company’s own screenshots that they favor the darker shades.  I have applauded this in the past as a way to ease eyestrain and distraction while performing photo and video editing.  It will be interesting to see what direction these changes go in other Adobe applications down the road.

Version 11 has also been rebuilt completely in 64-bit.  This is easily detected right at startup.  I compared version 10 and found that version 11 opened twice as fast on my MacBook Pro 2.66 Core i7 with 8GB of Ram.  (30 seconds compared to 15 seconds)  After opening, the speed is noticeable in everything from previewing effects to full-screen slideshows.  This is a great improvement over previous versions where the application always seemed a bit sluggish compared to the OS X native competitor iPhoto.

ELEMENTS EDITOR

An example of the new high key guided edit

There are several all-new guided edits, which are a core feature of the Elements editor.  Additionally there are a few new effects. Two of the new guided edits are the high key and low key styles. High key photography is a style wherein the key light (main front light) is significantly hotter than the other supporting lights resulting in a relatively flatly lit image and slight overexposure.  Low key is mostly the opposite of the high key effect, giving a flat, underexposed image. In the example above, I followed the tutorial's instructions to produce this high key portrait of a young boy.

Tilt shift guided edit

The tilt-shift guided edit is my personal favorite.  Professional cameras have for years had the options of using tilt-shift lenses.  These special lenses allow the focal plane to be skewed in creative ways, allowing the depth of field to be not simply front to back but left to right and top to bottom as well.  The tilt-shift guided edit in Elements 11 makes it very easy to duplicate this effect and tweak it to your personal preference.  I combined my sample waterfall image with the vignette and tilt-shift guided edits to add some nice interest to my photo.

Graphic Novel effect

There are also a few new effects available to users such as the comic, pen-and-ink, and graphic novel effects.  I used the graphic novel effect on this photo of my wife to give her a very simplified drawn look.  Some of these same effects can be found in the Creative Suite as well.

Making routine adjustments is faster with 9 quick options presented

Making routine photo tweaks has never been faster or easier than with this version of Elements.  Each quick edit is given a 9-square grid of adjustments to choose from.  Scrolling over any of them immediately previews the effect that it will have on your image.  This feature makes it very easy to visualize simple adjustments without having to go from screen to screen finding each one and moving sliders back and forth.

Organizing and sorting photos is easier

ELEMENTS ORGANIZER

Other than the organizer’s interface layout (which is significant), there aren’t a slew of new features to contend with.  Finding images is easier with an “iTunesesque” organization set.  You can choose from multiple categories of criteria to narrow down the image search results.  The people section is redesigned to display large thumbnails of each person labeled in your library.

My Elements library contains over 11,000 images and videos, but the 64 bit Organizer performs with exceptional speed.  I experienced little delay while jumping back and forth between different events or images that dated all the way back to 1955.  The visual similarity search introduced in version 10 is much more responsive in this version.  Adjusting the sliders presents the refined results promptly, a welcome relief from the lag time previously seen.

CONCLUSION

Unless you can't live without the dark background of previous Adobe Elements versions, there is no compelling reason to not upgrade to version 11.  Adobe has refined their consumer digital imaging product into an elegant and responsive software package worthy of any amateur or even professional photographer's use.  I was pleasantly surprised at how speedy the applications opened and operated having used previous iterations of Elements for five years.  Somehow, Adobe managed to pack a staggering number of features, both new and old, into a program while still offering users of all levels both ease of use and a heaping handful of digital imaging horsepower.  All for the low price of just $99.  I highly recommend Adobe Elements 11.