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Provides: Manipulation of pixels for image alteration, improvement, and/or enhancement.
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4.11 or newer, Intel Mac, 2GB storage space, 512MB RAM (1GB preferred), QuickTime 7.2 or greater.
Premium Retail Price: $99 ($20 mail-in rebate is currently available).

As a long time Photoshop user, I'm always intrigued about what can be accomplished with its younger sibling: Photoshop Elements. Truth is, a lot. That's good news, because Photoshop Extended, with all of its 3D charm and extra features, retails for $999 while the standard version of Photoshop is a svelte $699. So what do you get for the austere sum of $99? A lot of the technology from the big Photoshop, but designed for the user who wants to just "get it done." What you do not get is the depth and degree of control that big Photoshop can provide. But for many people, the power you will get is very likely more than you will use. Simply, I'd take Photoshop Elements over iPhoto any day.

Some may be a bit taken back with the numbering on this version of Elements; it's number 8. This follows number 6 that was released in January 2008. Since that time Adobe did release a version 7 for the PC and now the PC and Mac version are finally unified with version 8. You can read a review of Elements 6 written by Applelinks' Charles Moore here with some extra comments provided by yours truly. One of the things I pointed out was that Adobe had recently released CS3 with the new "elemental" icons such as Photoshop (Ps), InDesign (Id), and Dreamweaver (Dw). CS3 made a major change from past icons with the new different color schemes and all looking like a periodic chart of the elements when all lined up in the Mac's Dock. Curiously, Photoshop Elements 6 was provided with a small "camera" icon for its Dock icon. I found it amusingly ironic that the program called "Photoshop Elements" should not have one of the Elemental icons. Well that's been fixed, sort of. The new icon for Photoshop Elements 8 is "pse" as shown to the right. It is now obvious that companies read reviews (and more importantly "my reviews") and I will take full credit for this wise choice (even though there are no elements shown in the periodic chart of the elements that have three characters, but I digress...).

When you first start PSE for the first time, you might not notice too many different things but one thing right off might please those who do not enjoy the total slab approach to an application taking over your entire screen by the new Application Frame approach introduced with Adobe's Creative Suite 4. There are two advantages to the Application Frame approach: the first is that (if you have a Mac) you can turn it off (from the Window's menu) and that lets you see through the image(s) and Panels to any applications or the Finder open below PSE. The other advantage is that the Application Frame is a re-sizeable window. That is, you can mouse-down on the bottom right corner and resize the entire window so that you can have (for example) PSE pushed to the left side of your screen and Bridge pushed to the right size of your screen. (More on Bridge later.) This let's you flip back and forth between the two apps very easy.

Also gone from version 6 are the little tags to display or hide the Project Bin or the Palette Bin. Now you simply double-click the Project Bin title to hide/display that or click on the double chevrons to hide/display the Panels. [Since the release of CS4, all Adobe Palettes are now called Panels.]

There are three different "modes" in PSE, an Edit Guided mode that leads you through each step to process your image, sort of holding your hand. The Edit Quick approach assumes you know some basics and want to just do things quickly and are not too concerned how good/bad they look. Finally there is an Edit Full mode where you have the most control over process and can use ALL of PSE's tools, menus, Panels, etc.

However, as you change from mode to mode, the available tools varies. It's not as each different mode has fewer tools (it does that as well), but some of the tools found in Edit Quick mode are not found anywhere else. As it turns out, the features of these tools are in the Full Edit mode but are accessed a completely different way. The magnifying glass and hand are in all three, that's fine and makes sense. What's new in the Edit Quick mode are the three Smart Brushes with custom icons (the Toothbrush, Blue Skies, and the Black and White - High Contrast). The trick here is that if you look for these icons in the Full Edit mode you will not find them.

As much as I like PSE, I strongly disagree with this approach. I can understand why you limit the number of tools as you decrease complexity, that's not a problem. But to have tool icons in one mode that do not exist in the greater complexity mode is going to confuse people, like me.

The catch here is that the access/ interface for these same tools in the Full Edit mode is completely different: in the Toolbar, you will find the "Smart Brush Tool" coupled with the "Detail Smart Brush Tool." (The only difference between the two is the size of the brush.). Once you've selected the Smart Brush Tool, the tool options at the top of the screen now let you select from amongst eleven different preset actions as shown below. (Also note below the Refine Edge... button as well as the Inverse checkbox, more on them later.)

Back to the three new tools to the Quick Edit mode, let me describe some of the good and bad things about using these smart brushes in the Quick Edit mode by using the Toothbrush tool as an example. What the Toothbrush tool is used for is to brighten teeth. Probably the biggest reason why people do not do a broad tooth smile when their photo is taken is because they do not have the bright-white teeth advertisers insist we are supposed to have.

Working with PSE's Smart Brush (regardless if in Quick or Full Edit mode) is a very interesting process. PSE does a variety of very sophisticated tricks and techniques that are mostly invisible to the PSE user. Trust me, I say this in a good way. What it boils down to is if someone were to look at your PSE images in Photoshop, they'd assume that you were astute in your Photoshop activities. Meanwhile PSE is doing a lot of things under the covers to help give you some excellent results.

Notice the screenshot below showing the Layers Panel (seen using the Full Edit mode) after using the Toothbrush tool. What PSE did was to create a Solid Color Layer mask over the image and changed the Blending Mode of that layer to Soft Light so that the changes only effect the hue and brightness of the exposed region (the teeth). I should also point out that the color PSE selects to use is not pure white, it's a shade lighter than the original teeth. This is great because if it was pure white, the final images would look creepy or dreadful and your friends would never smile in front of you again.

To accomplish the mask and the selection, one of the big strengths of Photoshop is that it can find edges and a lot of the recent features within Photoshop have to do with the software self-discovering edges. An edge is any rapid change in color, saturation, or brightness. For example, the edge that you see of the roof of a house against the sky is an easy edge, but the gradient rouge on the cheek of a model as it's smoothed out over the face is a very non-defined edge. Photoshop can easily see the former, but the later is a much bigger challenge. I mention this because one of the limitations of the new Smart Brushes is despite the incredible abilities of these new tools to find edges, they are not perfect and the more challenging the edge the more they break down.

Smart Brushes are variations on the Direct Selection Tool (which can be seen in the Full Edit tools (3rd image above on the left), 2nd column 4th down). In fact, each tool is a "purposed-Direct Selection Tool." That is, each brush option starts with the Direct Selection Tool and then is pre-set to do some special action. When you drag a Smart Brush or the Direct Select Tool around, it seeks edges. Because teeth provide an easy contrast against a mouth, dragging the Toothbrush Tool or the Direct Selection Tool across the teeth provides an easy selection of the teeth as seen below.

It's at this point PSE sort of breaks down a bit, at least as far as the ease of use issue. One of the dynamics of any selection is how hard the edge of the selection is. There is a term in Photoshop called "feathering." Feathering allows a softer edge at the edge of a selection by providing some degree of transparency at the edge of the selection. The amount of softer edge depends on how many pixels wide your feathering setting is. When you look at the brush settings of Quick Edit, it appears that each of these new Direct Selection Brushes provide feathering options as part of the brush as seen below. In this case, decreased Hardness should indicate increased feathering. It didn't. I tried using a Wacom tablet and a mouse, I tried varying the parameters and nothing I did caused any difference.

If you are using the Smart Brushes in Full Edit mode, you have the Refine Mask option in the Tool Options bar or in the "Select" menu of PSE. (You will also find "Feather," an excellent tool for many years in Photoshop.) The Refine Mask option is shown below. While this does not have as many buttons and bells as Photoshop's version, it does let you dial in the amount of feathering and you can watch your image as you determine how much feathering is enough. One of the limitations of the Feather option is that you have to guess as to how many pixels you want to feather and if it's not enough or too much, you undo and do it again. The Refine Mask tool means that you can interact with the feathering and get just what you want.

So let me back up a bit here and answer the question as to why this is important? Below are three images, all at 300% magnification. The top is the original smile. The middle is using the Toothbrush tool from the Quick Edit mode. Notice how sharp and pixilated the teeth are. The teeth have a sharp selected edge that looks artificial. The bottom of the three is the same image with the same settings but I've softened the edge of the selection with some feathering and adjustments on the Contract/Expand control in the Refine Mask window.

What's interesting is that with the adjustments I made with the Refine Mask window, the teeth look better than what the Toothbrush tool did by itself, and that's besides the hard edge of the Toothbrush Tool.

Simply, if you are in Quick Edit mode, Adobe has simplified the interface to such a degree that you can't do all that much. They have removed so many buttons and bells that all you have is "bu."

What's curious is that even in Full Edit mode, alterations are not as easy as they could be. Let's say you really want to make the teeth a tad whiter. In Full Edit mode you have whiter teeth (called Pearly Whites) or even more whiter teeth (called Very Pearly Whites), but if you want something in between, the only way you can do that is how I would do that in the full Photoshop program where you double-click the color mask in the layer panel and manually adjust the amount of white you want. I find it surprising that they do not have a "dial-in" control to set the amount of whiteness.

Another one of these tools is " the Blue Skies Tool," which will give you the blue skies you didn't see on your cloudy vacation. Be advised that it's even more tricky to fine tune than Pearly Whites. Chances are, if you want blue skies, you are going to have trees and that means leaves, and that means difficult selections. As good as the Direct Selection tool and the Smart Brushes are, selecting around leaves is perhaps one of the 2nd hardest thing to select (with hair as the leading challenge).

Below is a screenshot of the results of Blue Skies, sort of. I chose to not go too crazy with the selection process, but you can see what kind of problems you can get. Specifically, there are regions where non-contiguous regions of the sky were not selected while some of the leaves were selected (and turned into a bright purple). When using the Smart Brushes you can add to any selection by clicking on more things and you can de-select things by Option-clicking on things. As you can see below, by not taking a lot of time doing fine-tuning on your selection, there will be regions not selected or other regions that were selected but shouldn't have been.

The biggest surprise is that I found the pre-selected Blending Mode less than optimum. For Blue Skies, Adobe has chosen Color Burn. Unfortunately I found that it didn't do much of anything. By changing the Blending Mode to Hard Light (and dropping the Opacity from 75% to about 50%) I was finally able to get an OK color in the sky. In other words, if you are limiting yourself to Quick Edit mode, you will be disappointed. If you use Full Edit mode and learn how to play with the controls you will get nice to great results.

So in short, I find the Smart Brushes in the Quick Edit mode to be a big disappointment despite the good intentions. I can only assume that this will be somewhat demoralizing to beginner users who are expecting to do a few things and have great results. Sorry folks, but the technology is not there yet. The good news is that by investing in a few evenings and learning how to do things the right way will pay big dividends over time.

One of the big tools brought over from Photoshop CS4 is Recompose. For those of you who use Photoshop, Recompose is PSE's name for Content Aware Scaling. I'll leave it to others as to which is the better name, but what it does is to let you manually change the aspect ratio of an image without distorting what's important. Typically this is done to move and arrange people around in an image. But rather than use people, I chose the image one image below where there was a concrete statue of a boy fishing on one end of a diving board and a small bridge a few yards away. What would that image be like if the bridge was a few feet away. Time for Recompose!

The process is simple, you select Recompose from the Image menu (or from the Tool Panel, it's coupled with the Crop tool) and eight small handles show up on each edge and side of the image. In the upper left corner of PSE are four small icons, a green brush and green eraser and red versions of the same. With the Green brush you drag across parts of the image that you want to be kept true and with the Red brush you drag across regions of the image you do not care about and can be sacrificed. The respective erasers let you erase the respective marks on the screen so you can adjust as needed. Then you drag the image's handle in the desired direction and the red or untouched regions will be shrunk while the green regions remained untouched.

As seen below, the top image is the original image. Below the top image are my guidelines to PSE for what I wanted to happen (green is keep, red is "remove as need be"). On the bottom left is an image that was not prepared via Recompose, all I did was to squish it narrower (note how the Bridge and the diving board have been significantly scrunched). On the bottom right is the result of Recompose. Note how the Bridge, diving board, and the boy are just as wide as in the original images.

Recompose is one of those tools that you may not need often, but when you do, it's great.

The other big tool in PSE is the "Scene Cleaner." Have you ever been some place where you wanted people to move so you could take a photo of a fountain but people just kept on wandering in? Well, what you need to do is to take (at least) two or more photos of the same thing so that you have one photo that has the "nothing" where in other photos you have someone walking by in the same location. Using the same red "toss" pen as shown above, when you combine the two photos, PSE will remove the unwanted person. This is a variation on the feature introduced in PSE-6 where you could take a bunch of photos of a group and de-select the poor faces so that only the smiley faces were seen in the final image.

The other big feature in PSE is blending of varying contrast images. This is one solution to a classic photographic conflict. If you are taking someone's photo and they are standing in front of an open window during the daytime, the window will be properly exposed but your subject will be very under-exposed. If you set your camera to properly expose them than the window is so over exposed that you can't make anything out outside. One of the big photographic techniques over the past several years is the growing influence of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. It's important to point out that what PSE is providing is not HDR photography. Rather, PSe is providing smart blending. The difference is quite significant because in HDR, you combine (at least) three different images of different shutter speeds to create a 32-bit image and then go through a process of Tone Mapping to bring that image back to a 16- or 8-bit image. More about HDR photography can be read here in my review of Photomatix.

Exposure blending can be much trickier than true HDR and Adobe has done a good job here, but it is not any kind of panacea. You can get OK images using PSE's auto mode but I found a lot of banding in regions like skies or clouds in skies If you are stuck taking a photo that you know the angle is working against you, than if you take several shots you can combine them later in PSE and blend them into something that might be better than any one of the originals.

If you use the manual option of blending, PSE uses a different route. Rather than actual blending of the images, PSE (by your guidance) tried to place objects that you select over objects that you want overwritten. Let me explain with the images below. The top image is an inside shot of a covered bridge in New England. Note the circled region #1 where you can see through the sides of the bridge to the properly exposed regions in the background. The foreground (inside the bridge) is underexposed. What PSE has you do is to wipe regions that you want replaced in the underexposed image. This was one of my attempts where I tried sweeps, swirls, and even very subtle dots and spots to try to control the regions being effected. In the 2nd image you can see where I've exposed better for inside the bridge but the background is too light (at circle #2).] In the final image you can see the results of my attempts: I've successfully lightened the insides of the bridge but also lightened the regions in the background (circle #3), regions that I did NOT want altered. Unfortunately, nothing I did was ever able to spot control these results.

Departing from Elements for a moment, once again Adobe did us a favor and has included Bridge as our Image parser. If you have more than one image on your computer you will find Bridge to be a wonderful place to store, pan through, work with, and isolate images. You can see my review of Bridge-CS4 here. The Bridge that is supplied with PSE is the same Bridge that comes with CS4 and there's a lot to like. Surprisingly, Windows users are provided "Organizer." I have never used Organizer, so I truly cannot compare. Nonetheless I do not feel like I'm missing anything. I am a big Bridge fan.

Besides Bridge-CS4, you also get Adobe Camera Raw. Again, the same one that's shipped with CS4. If you take raw images or not, this also is a very valuable tool in your photographic arsenal and does make up for a few deficiencies in PSE. (You can read my review of Adobe Camera Raw here.) One example where you will depend on ACR is if your image has Chromatic Aberration. There's no way to fix this in PSE, but can easily be done in ACR. In addition, if your image has some color casts, while they can be fixed in PSE, the easiest way to fix any color cast is in ACR (if there is any true gray in the image). The one comment/warning that you do need to know is that if you open any TIF or JPEG image in ACR, you can see the changes in the image only with Bridge. If you send someone those image, and the recipient does not have Bridge, they will not see any of the changes. This is because ACR places a hidden file within the JPEG or TIF file that tells what (changes) you did in ACR. Think of it like special glasses that only come with Bridge. If you want to send someone that JPEG or TIF image, you need to save it as a new image and send them the new file. This new file will incorporate all the changes you've done and your friend will see everything as you intended.

Amongst the advantages of Bridge, it not only helps you access your images, it also helps you interact with your images and PSE. If you are looking at your images in Bridge, go to the Tools menu and on the bottom you will see Photoshop Elements. If you drag down to that option, from the tree you can see the various options for constructing images. If you open your images, and then try to do a Panorama, or Scene Cleaner, you still have to go to the File -> New menu to select how you plan on working with them. On the other hand, if you are in Bridge, you can select the images you want to work with, and then from the Tools menu select how you want to work with the images and you are good to go. [Remember, you can Shift-click for contiguous images and Command-click for non-contiguous images.]

One last comment is the Help system: Adobe has gone into a semi-web based, semi-interactive help so that it can easily be updated and you can interact with others. I'm not a fan. If you select "Photoshop Elements Help..." from the Help menu, it will take you to a website with a web-based manual. If you look in the upper left hand corner of that screen, you will see an Acrobat icon and if you click on that link you can download the Elements PDF Help document, all 310 pages of it. Your call, but that's what I did.

In short, Adobe has done a fine job with the new Elements-8. What Adobe is trying to do, and mostly succeeds, is to create an image processing program that lets you obtain the same results as the professionals. If your images are the right kind of images, you will get great results right off the bat. On the other hand, a few subtle differences can cause an "easy to fix" image into a "oh, this will take some work" kind of image. I think they are promising more than can really truly be delivered at this point in time. If you try to use these tools and do not obtain suburb results, the features within Photoshop Elements 8 in the Full Edit mode are there to get your desired results--you will have to learn how to do that, it's not really hard.

The amazing thing about Photoshop Elements 8 is that it can do so much of what Photoshop can do at 1/10 the price. I am not sure if Adobe considers Elements a gateway drug into the full Photoshop program, that's your call. But there's no doubt Photoshop Elements is a great tool.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.