Photoshop Elements 15
Adobe’s budget image-editing app gets clever new organizational features and some fun special effects
What’s new in Adobe’s latest budget image-editing software
an application that gets to version 15 must be doing something right, and Adobe has very much settled on a look for Photoshop Elements, its stripped-down image-editing program. From version 11, each new release of the app has looked virtually the same, with the changes and upgrades focused on features. The application is still split into three ‘skill levels’, with Quick, Guided and Expert workspaces giving progressively less help and more creative control. New in version 15 are some additional Guided Edits: the ability to add motion blur, collage creation, the adjustment of facial features and the creation of cutout words from images. The big changes, however, are in the Organizer.
Photoshop Elements comes in two halves. There’s the Editor, which is where most of the editing work is carried out, and the Organizer. This scans your hard drive for pictures and analyses them. If, like us, you’ve got several thousand image files on your hard drive, this can take some time. Once it’s finished, you can sort your photos into albums, tag them to make finding them easier, and watch folders on your hard drive, such as My Pictures, so any future images are added to Element’s library. Once it’s processed your image library, which can take an extraordinarily long time, you can search it by automatically generated tags or those you’ve added yourself, locations pulled from GPS data or faces it’s detected. Once you start to amass a collection of image files, this makes life a lot easier.
Selecting a picture in the Organizer, which is now touchenabled for those with touchscreen laptops, allows you to run an Instant Fix or open it in the Editor. Instant Fixes can now batch-process images, to cut down on the time you spend editing if you’re only making a few tweaks, but you’re going to want to use the Editor for anything other than the absolute basics.
Unlike its Creative Cloud big brother you only pay once, rather than a subscription
Opening a Raw file brings you into a version of Adobe Camera Raw missing the more advanced options you’d find in Photoshop CC, but with the ability to adjust white balance, exposure, highlights and shadows, plus clarity and saturation, there’s enough to work with. Sharpening, noise reduction and camera calibration are also tucked away in the tabbed interface.
Elements’ interface can take up rather a lot of your screen – space that could be better used for seeing your image in. A few clicks is all it takes to collapse the Photo Bin or Tool Options panels, but it would be nice to be able to change the left-hand toolbar to a single strip of icons, and dock the useful set of floating palettes opened with the More button to the right.
If you’re looking for a new photo-editing app, Elements 15 is the one to get. It’s a mature product, free of bugs and unintended features. It’s well designed, available in a bundle with the Premiere Elements video editor, and unlike its Creative Cloud big brother you only have to pay once, rather than a monthly subscription. Owners of version 14, though, need to question whether the few upgrades to the Organizer and the new Guided Edits are worth the outlay.