Photoshop Elements

Adobe’s Photoshop has for long held the pride of place amongst professional image-manipulation tools. Photoshop Elements is an attempt to make available the same power in a more user-friendly packaging with easy-to-use presets.



You can choose not to install plug-ins, recipes, libraries and samples. Recipes are step-by-step instructions for applying specific effects like color correction and image clean up. Plug-ins are filters that you can apply to your images and text, to get interesting effects. You will find these filters in Photoshop 6, too.

On opening Elements, differences from Photoshop become apparent, though the interface and the menus look more or less the same. The tools palette is not as closely packed, and has items, like otherwise hidden functions of changing color saturation (sponge tool) or new ones like the impressionist brush, sharpen tool and red eye tool (for photographs). Another change is in the palettes (accessed in Photoshop through the Windows menu), which are available from a shorcut bar below the menu bar. Photomerge is a new tool that lets you create panoramic images from multiple photographs.

Photoshop lets you convert an image into a variety of modes, like CMYK or

Greyscale, while Elements gives only Bitmap, Greyscale, RGB and indexed color.

CMYK, a must for a print graphics professional, has been removed. That perhaps explains Elements’ much lower price. Image adjustments like adjusting levels, brightness and contrast, and balancing primary colors, have been moved to an enhanced menu, and higher-end features, like curves and saving adjustment settings, have been dropped. Also, the layers (a powerful tool in Photoshop) menu has been trimmed, removing things like masks and clipping paths. On the plus side, support for digicams has been improved.

There is no doubting the Photoshop power that lies in Elements. Features like Photomerge, the Recipe dropdown and the context-sensitive hints dropdown are useful for the beginner. But Elements retains much of the full-blown professional package, and is not smooth riding all the way. If you are nearer to being a Photoshop professional, than a complete novice, then Elements holds a lot of promise for you. But then why not go the whole hog, and use Photoshop? If for nothing else, then for the price difference. Photoshop 6 costs Rs 28,000, while Elements comes for just Rs 5,500!

Krishna Kumar