Finding the right formula was a slow process.

You just can’t buy anything that gives you more control over pictures than Photoshop does.īut Photoshop has some big drawbacks: It’s darned hard to learn, it’s expensive (and now a lot of people are turned off by Adobe’s new subscription-only Creative Cloud plan), and many of its features are just plain overkill if you don’t work on pictures for a living.įor several years, Adobe tried to find a way to cram many of Photoshop’s marvelous powers into a package that normal people could use.

Every photo you’ve seen in a book or magazine in the past 15 years or so has almost certainly passed through Photoshop on its way to being printed. It’s the Big Cheese, the industry standard against which everything else is measured. (For instance, if you’ve used Photoshop, what you know as Smart Sharpen is called Adjust Sharpness in Elements.) Happily, you have this book to guide you.Īdobe Photoshop is the granddaddy of all image-editing programs. It’s a capable, midlevel image-editing program, but you need to know where to find things, since Elements is laid out quite differently from Photoshop and some features have different names. If you’re one of them, Elements may be a good fit for you, but you need to be aware that a lot of features and controls are pretty well hidden in Elements.

Since Adobe introduced their new Creative Cloud monthly subscription plan for Photoshop, a lot of people are looking for an alternative that doesn’t require paying every month forever. Even if you already have a photo-management program like Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, you’ll find that Elements offers tools for certain tasks that you can’t perform with those programs. But for most people who aren’t creating images for commercial printing, Elements offers a very useful toolkit at an appealing price. If you run a graphics studio or a large professional photography business, then you need the full version of Photoshop. It lets you take a ho-hum shot and give it some wow. It’s easy to see why: Elements gives people all the tools they need to get the very best from their photographs.

When Photoshop Elements was first released back in 2001, it became a runaway success.

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