Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 £81 / $100 Windows /Mac

It’s Photoshop for editing novices

hotoshop Elements has long been popular with photographers looking for a cheaper and easier alternative to Photoshop, but Adobe’s swap to a subscription plan for Photoshop means the price differential is almost gone – you can get Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 for a year for just £20 more.

But Elements is still the easier option for image-editing novices. The Organizer app can sort, organise and search your whole photo library, and it connects directly with the Editor application, which has three modes: Quick, Guided and Expert.

Quick mode offers basic, pushbutton enhancements, but Guided

Pmode is more interesting because you can try out effects and learn how they’re done at the same time.

Expert mode is where you get to take full manual control, and it offers a good proportion of the tools in Photoshop itself – although the tool options panel design takes up a little too much space at the bottom of the screen. Back when Photoshop cost hundreds of pounds to buy, it was easy to accept that Elements offered a cut-down toolset. Now it’s not. You don’t get Curves adjustments (the Adjust Color Curves panel is not really a proper substitute); you can’t work in CMYK or Lab colour modes; and you don’t get Path or Pen tools for more complex editable selections.

Perhaps the biggest loss to photographers, however, is inside Adobe Camera Raw. The version that comes with Photoshop has 10 panels and is practically an image-editor in its own right. The version that comes with Elements has just three panels, catering for only the most basic raw-format adjustments.