Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 (beta)

In the beta release of Adobe Photoshop Elements 7, this photo editor and organizer hasn't made a major leap forward, but in convenience and alacrity, it's still several steps ahead of comparable packages. The most notable news is the major push Adobe is making to add online functions. Although the version I tested was a beta, I found its editing functions surprisingly stable and quick. Those familiar with the editing portion of previous iterations will find the same full, quick, guided edit modes in their accustomed places, with a few appreciated additions, too.

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The quick fix section, which lets you make simple corrections, now has a Touch Up panel that includes not just the requisite red-eye remover but some new twists, including a teeth-whitening tool, which does what you'd expect: You roughly outline a smile, and those pearly whites look a bit whiter (keep repeating the process, and you'll create a dazzlingly surreal look). Similarly, a new blue-sky tool allows you to boost washed out skylines by simply drawing a squiggle through the area to pick out the sky for the program. The sky effect can work well, assuming the area is well defined. Otherwise, it can be fooled by clouds or irregular horizons filled with trees, which will force you to revert to the old manual mode. The designers have also added a new black-and-white tool that can independently turn specific areas of a photo (say, the background behind a person) monochromatic while leaving the central object in color, but I found the effect more gimmicky than useful.

In guided mode, which is comparable to the How To's in Serif PhotoPlus X2, users get walk-throughs for tasks such as color correction and touching up scratches. The previous version of Elements had a photomerge feature that enabled users to combine the best of say, two group shots, and get everyone in the image you want. Adobe has beefed up this feature with a scene cleaner. Essentially, it allows you to eliminate elements of a picture by matching up two similar images, then drawing a line over a person or element in one that you want removed. The program seamlessly fills in the empty area using elements of the source image. It amounts to a sophisticated all-in-one extraction and blend tool, and I found it particularly helpful in vacation shots where interlopers kept wandering into my pictures.

Adobe has also added an "action player" to the guided mode. This tool, lifted from the professional version of Photoshop, allows you to use prerecorded macros. Actions encapsulate a series of editing maneuvers—such as the steps needed to make someone look thinner in a photo or to add zippy captions—in one stroke. However, where PhotoPlus X2 lets you record your own versions of these macros, Elements doesn't, which is disappointing. To expand this section (which contained only a handful of pre-recorded tasks in the beta), you'll have use actions made by others and offered online for free or a small fee.

Most of the full edit functions remain in place from the previous release. In addition, users get a smart brush option. This contains nearly a dozen different preset brushes that let you select and correct contrast and brightness in portions of an image. It also gives you access to the nifty little Touch Up functions, mentioned before, from the quick edit section.

With most editing tasks, Elements feels quicker than its competitors. Even changing zoom levels or making lens distortion corrections feels lighting fast compared with the likes of GIMP or PhotoPlus, which means you're more likely to try little tweaks and adjustments to images because you don't have to wait to see the effect. Naturally, the amount of time various feature require to complete depends on your system. I was testing on an HP Pavillion dv9000 with a 2.01-Ghz AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile processor, 2GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce GO 7600 graphics subsystem, and Windows XP Professional, SP2.

What was once the main raison d'être of Elements—the Organizer program—has taken more of backseat over the years as the editing program has continued to grow, but the organizer is still one of the best of its ilk. Its core is the album metaphor for grouping images, and it offers all the standard tagging options for creating collections.

Adobe has bolstered the search function in the organizer. As you'd expect, you can look for shots based on key-word tags, a particular album subject (Canada vacation, say), or by date. But now you can use the search tool to look though all of an image's associated metadata as well, including captions and file names you may have added. You can look for "JQ," and you'll get any shots with that in title, or you can search for "Canon" for all the images taken with that brand of camera.—Next: Online Components

Online Components

A major new focus of this version of Elements is Adobe's online service, Photoshop.com, which includes tutorials, photo sharing features, and backup storage. Basic membership is free, and a premium pricing structure offers features such as increased remote storage (20GB versus the free 5) starting at $49.99 a year.

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With the basic service, you'll notice the appearance of context-sensitive tips and tricks on the right-side panel. For example, in edit mode, you'll see a tip on how to add creative text and captions to images—nothing too sophisticated, but helpful if you're a neophyte. More subtly, on the bottom right edge of the border there's a button for tapping into online tutorials. Some are composed as Flash videos and others are simple text-and-graphics walkthroughs. Adobe plans to keep adding to the tutorials by outsourcing some to professional photographers and encouraging amateurs to submit their own tips in Flash or PDF formats (to be vetted by Adobe before posting, of course).

Elements has had links to sharing services, such as Flickr, before, and those persist in version 7, but now Adobe has added its own sharing service into the mix with Photoshop.com. You choose a page name (for example, yourname.photoshop.com), and then, on an album-by-album basis, upload images to share. Being forced to use the relatively inflexible album approach can be annoying. You can work around this by creating albums that contain just one or two photos. And the feature has some very handy synchronizing capabilities, so that when you change an album on your desktop, the change is automatically reflected in the shared online version. For example, if someone wants you to remove an image online or edit something out, you can make the change on your PC and the online version will reflect the alterations automatically. And, of course, you can set sharing to be public or private. For the latter, the program will send out e-mail invites to addresses taken automatically from Microsoft Outlook.

Many users will find the online backup feature very practical. It too operates on an album-by-album basis rather than simply backing up every photo you have on your hard drive. But, as with the sharing feature, if you adopt Adobe's album organization wholeheartedly, you'll find that it offers some nifty features. For example, you can back up new albums automatically, and any shots added or changes made to existing images in albums will be translated automatically to the backed-up album online.

The backup solution also dovetails nicely with the remote-access component, anywhere access, which allows you remotely access albums you've backed up from any Web browser. That's convenient, but even more so is the ability to upload photos to your online area when you're away from home. The program will then sync the new images back down to your desktop PC at home.

Most of the online sharing components look promising, though in beta form some were only sporadically operational and not always fully functional. However, the desktop editing and organizing software, even in its pre-release form, was quite stable. So consumers looking to expand beyond simple photo editing and move on to organizing and sharing will be comfortable with Elements. It doesn't match the more sophisticated, deeper editing feature sets offered by Serif PhotoPlus X2 and Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, such as the wraparound VRs of the former or the graphics-creation package of the latter, but it's a lot easier to navigate than the competing products.

Adobe hopes to introduce the final product in late September, when it will also let Windows Mobile phone users not only view their albums on a handset but also upload images from a cell phone to their own pages online. The feature will still be in beta when the desktop software launches, but the company plans to add compatibility for other mobile handsets. There's still work to be done between now and September, but based on the strength of Photoshop Elements 7's core editing tools, ease of use, and even the bare-bones preliminary online functions, Adobe is still a strong option for consumer photo editing.

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