Photoshop Elements 2018
Adobe’s image-editing app gets yet another update
OFFERING PHOTO EDITING for newcomers, the enthusiastic amateur photographer, or even those pros who don’t care about things such as CMYK or 16-bit color, Elements has long punched above its weight. Offering 90 percent of Photoshop’s most useful features for a fixed price, rather than an annual subscription, and available as a standalone app or in a bundle with its video-editing brother, Premiere Elements, Photoshop Elements is one of the best ways to get into “proper” image editing, rather than playing with filters and emoji.
The Elements interface remains unchanged since version 11, released in 2012. The shift to a year in the app title, rather than a version number, makes it a bit easier to tell how old your version is in future, which can only strengthen the urge to upgrade to the latest annual release.
So, you get the familiar troika of Editor modes—Quick, Guided, and Expert, plus eLive for help and inspiration, and Camera Raw for developing raw files—to choose from, depending on what you want to do and your own skill level. As is often the case, new features are mainly found in Quick and Guided, although Expert does benefit from a new auto-selection tool that should take some of the frustration out of selecting areas with detailed edges.
It works well; dragging a square around an object in your image triggers a short pause, followed by the familiar marching ants outline of a selection. We tried to confuse it with a brown bear against a brown backdrop, but it homed right in on what we wanted. There was a bit of backdrop retained between the bear’s legs, but nothing we couldn’t sort out with a few clicks.
Elsewhere, there’s the ability to open eyes that were blinking when the photo was taken—as long as you have another photo of the same person with their eyes open—and a whole lot of guided edits for replacing backgrounds, creating double exposures, and more.
Then there’s Auto Curation. The Organizer half of the app—which, as you’ve probably guessed—organizes your photo collection, has benefitted from face detection in the past, but now gets new powers to choose the best out of a group of photos. It’s activated with a simple checkbox at the top-right of the Organizer interface, and as you might expect, is quite processor-intensive, especially if you import a large photo library. The app also creates a slideshow from the photos Auto Curate selects, so you can show off your skills to family and friends with little to no interaction on your part. It’s worth reviewing the system’s choices yourself, however, as we found it tended to choose pictures so similar as to almost be duplicates. Sure, they were good photos, but we only needed to see each one once.
Elements gets better every year, but the changes are never big enough to make current users upgrade immediately. For new users, it’s a compelling package, but Affinity Photo, the challenger to Adobe’s crown, is less than half the price for a package that concentrates on editing, rather than organizing and automation.
For its target audience, Elements 2018 is the best all-round photo-editing app, with the auto-selection tool taking away one of the biggest frustrations many new users find with Expert mode, and the new Guided edits enabling spectacular transformations of your photos, while gently teaching you how the app works. As long as you can stomach the price, it’s hard to go wrong.