Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 September 2011

What is Adobe Photoshop Elements 10?

Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 is the tenth version in a long-running series of photo-editing software. Photo-editing software allows you to make changes to your digital photographs, for example altering colour, brightness and composition.

Although you can make these alterations using widely available free software, such as Pixlr and Microsoft Live Photo Gallery 2011, Photoshop has extra tools that keen photographers will enjoy, as we found when we tried Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. The latest version has more features than ever before, so we eagerly tried it out before sending it to our test lab for a more thorough examination.

See how free and paid-for software compare for ease of use and performance in our latest lab test of photo-editing software.

How easy is it to use Adobe Photoshop Elements 10?

There is no mistaking that this software is very complex. The sheer range of tools and power that you have to manipulate digital images is huge, perhaps unsurpassed among consumer level photo-editing software. A brief look at the main editing screen hints at this. There's an uninviting grey screen, lots of small icons on the left, lots of menu options at the top and some tabs on the right. It isn't an appealing look, especially if you're a novice to photo-editing software.

Clicking on the Help menu at the top, followed by the Getting Started option is a good place to begin as it gives access to a range of online videos to help you get started with Photoshop. On our test version of the software this linked to videos instructing on the use of version 9, but they are still very helpful and worth watching. We assume Adobe will update these videos soon. Alternatively, opening an image using File/Open and playing around is another good way to learn.

If you go down this route, look at the Edit tab on the right where you'll find three sub tabs, Full, Quick and Guided.

Full is selected by default. This contains some advanced tools and a huge amount of creative effects, building on the number included in version 9. Adding a Watercolour effect, for example, is just one of a hundred. Not only that, but you can very finely tune the gradation of each effect.

Select Quick if you want to do a very quick touch up on your photo. Here, you can adjust brightness and colours, or just press the autocorrect button. The software will adjust the photo for you, and usually the result is pretty good.

The Guided tab is very useful and helps you along with more complicated editing. As well as basic manipulations it offers more advanced ones like skin tone and depth of field adjustments, with more explanations, help and guidance on what you can do and how you can do it.

Overall, Adobe Photoshop Elements is complicated, and requires time and effort to get the most out of it.

Adding text around a shape

What new and interesting features does Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 have?

Like most paid-for photo-editing software these days, Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 has a picture organiser. This one has some impressive features that could come in handy especially if you have a huge collection of photos and sometimes have trouble finding them. You can, for example, find and return all your photos with a common theme, all pictures of your dog, the Eiffel Tower, or a sunset, for example. You can also quickly delete duplicate photos using the duplicate photo search function. 

The photo recognition technology, which scans through your pictures reading colours, patterns and outlines, does a good job of this although it does occasionally bring back the odd photo you weren't expecting. 

Photo recognition can also help you quickly tag familiar faces from your Facebook friends list, and share them on Facebook via the Photoshop Elements organiser. You can also quickly upload videos to YouTube.

Other new features include more flexibility when adding text to photos. Instead of just being able to add text in a horizontal straight line you can add it around shapes or objects in your photo. You can also paint special effects on portions of a photo, so you can change the style the background in a portrait photo for example, and it's now much easier to create collages.

One of the most common edits, however, is cropping. Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 has a new crop guide which assists you in cropping your photos to create more interesting compositions.

Is Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 worth it?

Version 10 is a gentle evolution over version 9, so you'd have to be keen to upgrade. If you are starting from afresh though and think you would like to do more than simple editing, Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 makes a tempting proposition. We look forward to putting it through its paces in our full lab test.

It costs £79, or £65 if you are upgrading from an earlier version. You can buy it alongside Adobe Premiere Elements 10, a video-editing package, for £119 or £98 as an upgrade from earlier versions.

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