The Creative Toolbox: Surprisingly Agile Photoshop Elements

George Penston

Adobe Photoshop keeps marching along: Now in its seventh incarnation, this mega-program retails for about $600. While many of us have been able to keep up with its new features and pay its upgrade prices through the years, imagine what it must be like for newcomers trying to start with Photoshop from scratch nowadays. Many amateur photographers and imaging hobbyists who don’t get paid to use Photoshop day-in and day-out would like to take advantage of the powerful features and creative flexibility Photoshop is known for, but they’re quickly put off by its steep learning curve and even steeper price.

Wouldn’t it be great if Adobe delivered a more accessible version of Photoshop with a price just about anybody could afford? Enter Photoshop Elements, Adobe’s middle-of-the-road image-editing software intended to bridge the gap between the entry-level PhotoDeluxe and professional powerhouse Photoshop. Now that Adobe has discontinued PhotoDeluxe, Photoshop Elements will have to be the solution for not only imaging hobbyists but novice computer users as well. This shouldn’t be of much concern since there’s a lot of help built into Photoshop Elements to get just about anyone going.

Photoshop Elements 2.0 is chockfull of new features and enhancements over the original release, some of which are exclusive to Elements while others made their way over from the latest version of Photoshop. What’s more, Elements is fully compatible with Mac OS X and Windows XP just like Photoshop 7.0.

With Photoshop Elements retailing for $99, it’s obviously worth the price. But perhaps the bigger question is how capable of a tool is it for hobbyist? And could creative professionals on a shoestring budget get away with using it?

Help Everywhere You Turn
One of the biggest hurdles for first time users of Photoshop is how intimidating it can be. Here is this big, looming application housing dozens of choices tucked away in its many tools, palettes, and menu commands, staring blankly back at you with not so much of a hint of what to do first. Questions like “What should I do?, What’s next?, What does this do? What does that mean?” quickly become stumbling blocks. Photoshop Elements tries to eliminate those questions by including help and guidance every step of the way.

First off, Elements greets you at start up with a friendly Welcome screen (see figure 1). The screen presents the basic set of choices to get things underway. You can elect to create a new file, browse for an existing file, connect to a camera or scanner, or exit this screen and return to regular menus.

Figure 1: The Welcome screen is a nice jumping-off point.

Other novice-friendly features are the Recipes and Hints palettes. The Recipes palette is a great tool if you’re unsure what to do or how to go about doing it. Recipes spell-out simple-to-follow steps for performing common tasks, such as fixing up and sharing photos, adding special text effects, and creating Web graphics, to name a few (see figure 2). You can also download new Recipes from Adobe’s Web site.

Figure 2: Recipes offer the ability to “do the steps” for you.

When setting out to learn a new application, discovering each tool’s function can be a time-consuming, painful process. The names of tools don’t always reflect what you do with them, so you’re left having to jump between the manual and the application. The Hints palette in Elements eases this pain by presenting informative descriptions and illustrations about the currently selected tool (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Hints make it clear what each tools is meant for.

Although Recipes and Hints are great features from version 1, many brand-new features have been added to increase the help available. For instance, tips are available directly inside the more imposing dialog boxes (see figure 4).

Figure 4: Dialog tips are sprinkled everywhere. Here’s one located at the top of the new Frame from Video dialog that allows you to grab frames from standard video formats.

And if you happen to do something wrong, Elements’ new Smart Messages kick in. These take error messages to a new level. Written in easy-to-understand language, Smart Messages not only inform you of what you did wrong but in some cases will offer to fix the problem (see figure 5). What a novel idea, helpful error messages! Typical imaging and common Photoshop terms that appear in the messages link to a comprehensive glossary. There’s even a Help Search Field located in the shortcuts bar for finding all the relevant information on a tool, palette, or menu command. All these new features and tools go a long way in helping to guide new users through the rough spots of digital imaging and directs them to the wonders a lot faster.

Figure 5: A sampling of the Smart Messages found through out Photoshop Elements 2.0.

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