New in Photoshop Elements 2022
PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 2022 http://www.adobe.com/ photoshop-elements Some photos
Imagination
ADOBE UPDATES PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS, its beginner-friendly image-editing app, every year, but we’re starting to wish it didn’t. The problem is not that it’s an excellent program, but the urge to upgrade to the latest version is strong and the new features rarely justify the price.
It’s fine if you only upgrade every time you buy a new PC, but annually? Elements isn’t priced as a subscription, unlike its big brother Photoshop CC, which gets a constant flow of patches and upgrades. Instead, you pay once and use the software for as long as your PC supports it.
The 2022 version of the app piles on the automation, with clever transformations powered by Adobe’s Sensei cloud tech. There’s a thrust in the direction of moving images too, with mobile overlays that can add fun to social media posts. There’s photo warping, edits to perfect your pet pictures, clever background extensions, new slideshow templates, and more. –IAN EVENDEN
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PHOTO WARPING
Image warping is now more strongly built into Elements. If you want to make an image fit to the contours of another, open it on a new layer, then press Ctrl + T to enter Free Transform and resize it to fit. Then click the new icon on the bottom bar that looks a bit like the windshield of a car, or a bent window with a curved line underneath it. This toggles you into Warp mode, and the corner handles on the image you’re transforming will now bend it in on itself, and eventually fold it back over itself if you pull them far enough [ Image A]. There’s a pop-up menu called Warp at the bottom of the interface, which allows you to choose and customize pre-set warp shapes. It’s a bit of a difficult tool to get to grips with, and proper preparation and sizing of the image you want to warp is crucial, but for those times you want to fit an image around a curve, it’s extremely useful.
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TURN PHOTOS INTO ART
Obviously, your photos are already art. What this Sensei-powered feature does is to turn them into paintings. It’s like the Watercolor or Oil painting filters of old but brought bang up to date. Find it by opening either Quick or Expert mode and clicking the FX Effects button at the bottom right, then choosing the Artistic tab. There are loads of choices, some of them based on a single recognizable painting or artist, while others are more abstract. There are 30 to choose from, and each can be modified with a Keep Original Photo Colors checkbox, which often appears to do nothing of the sort, an intensity slider, and the ability to apply the effect to the subject or background (or both) using Adobe’s clever auto-selection tech [ Image B].
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Image C]:
MOVING PICTURES
This isn’t easy to demonstrate in print, so you’ll have to use your imagination. Designed for exporting animated GIFs and MP4 files for use on social media, drop down the Enhance menu and choose Moving overlays to access them. Look at [ there were a few dandelion seeds flying in the air around the model when we found this picture, but choosing the dandelion moving overlay has added more, plus they move. Once again, you can prevent moving parts from going over the subject of your photo by ticking the relevant box. If Sensei gets it wrong—and it’s good at getting it right—you can tweak it manually by clicking Refine Overlay and using the tools to add and subtract from the selection by painting. Performance in this tool is pretty slow, even on our 16-core PC, and especially on a 4K screen which required zooming in to 250 percent on a 1080p image. There’s an Export button built into the interface, so you can export either as a GIF or MP4 movie file. However, there isn’t a lot of control over the end result, especially if you choose MP4.
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PET PORTRAIT PERFECTION
You’ll find Perfect Pet in the Special Edits section of Guided Mode, and it’s a bit like the clone tool being given a section of its own. The idea is that you can remove things like leads and collars, then fix up the image to fine-tune the lighting and remove dirt and spots. Open the photo in Guided mode, select the edit, and you’ll find all the tools you need on the right of the interface. Remove collar and leash is where the cloning comes in, while fur is relatively easy to build something realistic-looking and avoid the repeated patterns that give away the presence of the rubber stamp. Elsewhere, there are sliders to adjust the lighting, plus crop and straighten the image. If you want a one-click fix, you can hit the FX Effects button at the bottom of the right-hand panel, and choose between Auto-Correct or other simple solutions to common problems. There’s also a handy split-view feature, at the top left, which can show a before and after view so you can easily see how far you’ve altered the original image [ Image D].
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EXTEND BACKGROUND
Another Special Edit in Guided mode, this is essentially an implementation of Content-Aware Fill from Photoshop CC. It’s particularly useful for turning crops of portrait images into landscape ones, or creating wide image files, such as Facebook profile cover photos. There are presets for common social media formats, as well as sizes such as A4 landscape. You can choose between stretching the image (Extend) and cloning (Autofill) it, and both have their pros and cons. If you’re stretching, you can protect part of the image by masking it with a brush to make sure only the background gets stretched and not the subject. Cloning can fall victim to repeated patterns but it generally does a good job, and you can always touch it up later in Expert mode. There’s a spot healing brush for minor fixes, and the ability to view before and after comparisons.
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WHAT ISN’T NEW
The old Photoshop Elements interface we’ve had since version 11 still hasn’t had an overhaul. It’s too big and takes up too much space on 4K monitors. The app is still split into three sections, Quick, Guided, and Expert, and doesn’t support CMYK color separations to maintain a gap between the pro CC product. Otherwise, everything in Photoshop Elements until now is still there, making it a comprehensive photo-editing application.