Most of the power, little of the cost
Like its forerunner, Photoshop Elements 4.0 carries a suggest price of £70 (inc VAT). But, unlike V3, V4 is only for Windows – though a Mac version is promised at some unspecified date.Version 4 arrives at the same time as Premiere Elements 2.0 - the new lite version of Adobe's Windows-only video editor, Premiere (see separate news story. This also has a £70 SRP but Adobe will be offering both programs together in a money-saving £100 bundle.
Reviewers – most of them graphics experts - seem to have been unstinting in their praise for V3 of Photoshop Elements. But, in part, that's because it delivers, at fraction of the cost, much of the power of the full Photoshop – a program that dominates the world of professional graphics.
However, this very fact made earlier versions of Elements somewhat daunting for mere mortals to use. That's a hurdle Adobe is trying to overcome with V4. It sees ordinary folk as being Elements 4's prime target and has realised that more nimble-footed competitors already offer ease-of-use features that were conspicuous by their absence from V3.
So Adobe is adding a selection of new and improved automatic functions – and better organising their layout – so that, the company says, users can concentrate on being creative rather than being technicians. More cynically, we see this increasing the program's appeal to a wider range of non-technical people.
Photoshop Elements 4.0's Quick Fix screen brings together many of the
automated editing tools, including red-eye removal, which works okay
when it detects the problemNew features are topped by automatic red-eye removal; auto imagine-straightening, to make horizons horizontal and buildings upright; and a Magic Selection Brush that's said to make it fast and easy to changes colour, lighting and contrast in different parts of a photo and is accompanied by a manual adjustor for shadows, highlights and mid-tones.
This manual adjustor alone could be worth the price of entry for many people, judging by the few quick experiments we carried out with a press beta of V4. It allows over-exposed or under-exposed parts of an image to be automatically corrected without adversely affecting those parts which were okay to start with – and doesn’t require selection of which areas will or won't be changed.
