Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Great solution for the non-professional
This software does most of what Photoshop does, but at a much lower price and is easier to use. This includes adjusting lighting, contrast, color, sharpness, and fixing red-eye. It has Levels and layers just like Photoshop, and a lot of painting/drawing tools. You can burn-in and dodge, and apply changes to just the selected portions of an image. You can adjust the layer "mask", adding and removing effects to portions of the image even after you create an adjustment layer. It can be a little intimidating at first because of the power of such things as layers, but the wealth of improvements you can make to your photos is amazing. You CAN print multiple pictures on a page, in multiple formats at once, despite what "Disappointed" said. You can also construct a set of web pages to display your work using a powerful wizard. The manual isn't bad, but provides little guidance on when to use various corrections, so a good book on this software is recommended.
Rating: - Simply the BEST for serious image editing
I bought Microsoft Digital Image Pro 7 as an upgrade from Picture It. Was disappointed that it did not handle large image files and had primitive selection tools. Returned it for a refund. I evaluated trial versions of PhotoImact, Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop Elements2. I picked Elements2 because it is a superb, user-friendly image-editing program. For me, the three key considerations are 1) Powerful image editing tools, 2) Ease of use, and 3) The learning curve. POWERFUL IMAGE EDITING TOOLS?
Elements2 has multiple tools and techniques to accomplish any image-editing task. Cropping, rotating and changing perspective is easy. Changing perspective is useful to "straighten out" vertical lines of buildings when the picture is shot with a wide-angle lens. If the horizon in the picture is slightly off, don't worry. There's a technique (window-info command) to measure the angle of the horizon to a fraction of a degree to determine how much to rotate the picture to make the horizon "perfectly level". The "red eye" correction tool is elegantly simple and yet very precise. Lighting can be adjusted with levels, contrast, brightness and layers commands. Fill flash and studio lighting (filter-render-lighting effects command) can be added to the photo to correct for poor scene lighting when the picture was taken. Color correction and adjustment couldn't be faster or easier; it's all done with a few mouse clicks. One mouse click can eliminate a color cast. The "color variations" command lets you change colors of midtones, highlights, and shadows and adjust saturation and brightness while viewing thumbnail previews of the potential adjustments. And there's a slick "replace color" command to change part or all of the image. At some point in image editing, you want to adjust part of the image, not the entire image. Selection tools make this possible. Elements2 has the best selection tools I've seen. All of the selection tools work together making it fast and easy to select a part of the image with "surgical precision". Most competitive programs either make you work to make selections or they lack precision. Elements2 takes the work out of the selection process. I believe selection tools and layers are the key to serious image editing. Elements2 has the best selection tools and an excellent set of tools to work with layers. It's simply the best software for serious image editing. Professionals will probably opt for the more sophisticated Adobe Photoshop software, but Elements2 is everything I need. Most competitive image editing software does not provide color management tools. But Elements2 includes Adobe Gamma software to adjust your monitor so that your printer can faithfully produce the colors you see on the screen. You have to e-mail Hewlett Packard to learn how to set your printer configuration. Once you've done that, Elements2 gives you several choices in the "print preview" command to fine tune color management of printed output. EASE OF USE?
Adobe's software engineers did their homework. They have tamed power by making almost every image editing task possible by a few mouse clicks. The "quick fix" command is elegantly simple and yet it provides a wide range of adjustments to photos. Once you have used a command it is easy to remember. The user interface is simple. THE LEARNING CURVE?
How long does it take for a novice to learn the program? I viewed the tutorials from the Elements2 welcome screen and reviewed the manual. The tutorials were too simplistic. They taught just one thing to a novice who needs a perspective for this software. The Elements2 manual is "dry" reading, like a dictionary. The manual is not really a tutorial, it's more of a reference assuming you already know the basics of how to use the program. What's the novice to do??? A good way to learn new software is a book. I read "Photoshop Elements2 - Zero To Hero". It is written in a narrative, easy to read form with lots of examples. Within a few hours with the book, I became comfortable with Elements2 and found that I could use the new software easily. If I had not bought a book, I probably would have complained that this software is hard to use. In my opinion, novices can't figure out how to use Elements2 if they limit learning to what Adobe supplies with the software. Do yourself a favor; buy a book written in a narrative format. Spend a few hours with the book. You'll gain a perspective for the program and how to use it. Once you have that, you can use the Element2 manual as a reference to learn about some specific aspect of the program. Also, you can use the recipes and hints that Adobe includes in Elements2. BOTTOM LINE
Photoshop Elements2 = SIMPLY THE BEST FOR SERIOUS IMAGE EDITING.
Rating: - 90% of Photoshop for 10% of the price
I had always meant to learn Photoshop, since it seemed to me to be the best way to learn about how digital imaging really works. I wanted to learn layering and masking and all those arcane things I had read about. However, I wasn't quite ready to make the $... investment that Photoshop requires. Instead, I struggled with Photoshop LE and Photo Deluxe. Neither of these was very satisfying, and Deluxe was especially geared to the greeting cards and "projects" audience.Elements 2.0 is really Photoshop with the pre-press taken out. It has all the layering and filters and plug-ins that you are likely to need for photo retouching and other uses you would normally need Photoshop to handle. I've been very pleased wiht the results I've had from it. If you need more power, buy Richard Lynch's book (Hidden Power of ....). He includes a CD with lots of additional tools like curves and RGB channels etc. that Adobe probably didn't want you to get in PS Elements. There are still some limitations. A few commercial plug-ins for PS don't work in Elements, and some instructions that you read for doing things in PS won't work in Elements. But this is the program to have if you want to get serious about photos. As an aside, let me strongly recommend a plug-in that works in Elements and regular PS. It's called iCorrect, and it lets you make very accurate color corrections with just a few clicks. It's really magic. check it out at Picto.com.
| 
