Hands-On Review: Photoshop Elements 7

This Adobe Elements software bundle is without a doubt one of the best deals on the market.

This Adobe Elements software bundle is without a doubt one of the best deals on the market. It brings together simplified versions of two of Adobe’s most sought-after programs at a fraction of the price.

Photoshop CS4 and Premier CS4 are professional-grade programs for photography and video editing respectively. They’re also outlandishly expensive and have more features than the common user would ever need. That’s where the Elements bundle comes in.

Photoshop Elements 7 and Premier Elements 7 run on the same engine as their CS4 counterparts, yet they only include the features that most novice users will need. Both programs are sold together for close to $100, in contrast to the full CS4 versions which cost nearly $700 each.

The bundle also comes with a free subscription to Photoshop.com, Adobe’s online photo-sharing and editing site. You'll be granted 2 GB of storage space to start, which you can upgrade later.

Elements cuts out some of the more advanced features of Photoshop and Premier, but given that a good number of users will never need such features, they aren’t missed. Free from the more complex components of the original programs, Elements has a clean, fast, easy-to-use interface.

Photoshop Elements 7

At first glance, Photoshop Elements 7 may seem a bit intimidating, yet most users will find themselves picking it up quickly. This program is geared toward the novice, and Adobe has designed Elements to make it accessible to users with no previous Photoshop experience.

For those taking their first steps into the Photoshop world, Elements has a “guided” edit section that takes you through different editing procedures step-by-step, complete with full descriptions and one-click access to some of the program’s more advanced features. Even for more advanced users with past experience in Photoshop, this feature can be extremely helpful.

For new users, the guided edit section makes seemingly complicated tools easy to use. For experienced users, this section offers quick, one-click access to editing procedures that would be much more time consuming in the full version of Photoshop.

Adobe also includes a “Quick” editing section that provides a list of light and color editing bars. Some of the bars also have an Auto adjust mode that automatically adjusts the setting to the calculated best spot. Beginners should find this feature useful, though more experienced users will want to move beyond it. It feels like the “Auto” function on a camera—it makes things faster, yet you can’t always trust it to gauge the correct settings.

Going beyond the basics, Elements does have some features that rival even the full CS4 version of Photoshop.

The Camera Calibration Tool is much easier to use in Elements than in Photoshop. The tool lets you correct bulging photos and the “bent building” look that’s often seen in pictures of larger buildings.

The Smart Brush Tool is also much friendlier than in Photoshop. With a couple of simple clicks, you can paint close to 65 different effects onto specific areas of your pictures. For example, you can single out a colored subject while painting everything else in the picture black and white, giving it a nice, artistic feel. You can also apply features to the entire picture, giving it, for example, a brown-washed vintage look.

I found this tool particularly helpful in bringing out certain colors while darkening others. The auto-select Smart Brush Tool is also fairly accurate in selecting different portions of the picture when editing.

The Spot Removal Tool is also well done. This tool lets you remove dust or certain objects in the picture. I found it to be more accurate than the spot removal tool in Lightroom 2, which tends to leave orb-like ghosts on the picture. Using the tool in Elements, I was able to make quick work of a pigeon that found its way into my photo with just a few clicks—something that couldn’t have been done easily in Lightroom.

Next week: Premier Elements 7