Review: Photoshop Elements 5.0 photo-editor

At first glance, this latest version of Photoshop Elements is a little disappointing. Previous upgrades to this low-cost photo-editing program have offered a variety of eye-catching special effects, and powerful editing tools.

The new features in Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 don’t have that sort of attention-grabbing visual flair but, on closer inspection, they do turn out to be pretty useful all the same. There are a few new editing tools available, but they’re mainly corrective tools that will appeal to fairly experienced photographers.

The Correct Camera Distortion filter allows you to correct lens distortions or perspective problems. It’s useful, but you’ll need to know your way around your camera pretty well and to understand technical terms such as pincushion and barrel distortion in order to use it properly.

The same thing applies to the new Colour Curves command. This allows you to fine-tune the exposure of your photos by adjusting settings such as contrast, backlight, shadows and midtones.

The Colour Curves dialog box does provide you with a series of previews that show how different settings affect your photos, so you don’t need to be an expert in order to simply select whichever preview looks best. Again, though, an understanding of how tone curves work would help if you’re going to get the best out of this feature.

Those are the main new editing tools. Most of the other new features focus on organising your photo collections and sharing them with others. That doesn’t sound terribly exciting, we know, but there are some useful features here.

Previous versions of Photoshop Elements included a feature called Stacks, which allow you to group a set of photos together – perhaps stacking together a series of photos of the same person or scene. The Stacks feature has been improved so that Photoshop Elements can now scan your photo collection and automatically stack photos that are visually similar.

This is a good way of quickly organising a large collection of photos, and the program can show you which photos it wants to stack together so that you can override its selections if you want to.

There’s also a new type of stack called a Version Set. When you edit a photo you can group the original photo in a stack along with any edited versions of that photo. This allows you to experiment by editing a photo in various ways, while still keeping all the different versions of the photo neatly stacked along with the original photo.

We also like the new Creations tool, which allow you to create your own customised collages and other types of documents. A few months ago, Adobe bought Macromedia – the company that developed the Flash animation software that is used on so many websites.

This has allowed Adobe to add some new Flash-based animation features to Photoshop Elements, such as the ability to create a Flipbook that quickly plays through a series of photos to create the appearance of motion.

You can also create interactive collages of photos to put onto your personal website. These allow other people to click on the photos on a web page and move them around or to zoom in on individual photos. It's pretty impressive stuff, although some of the templates and themes that they provide for your web pages are pretty cheesy.

Photoshop Elements 5.0 may not have the same wow factor as previous upgrades, but its new features will quickly earn their keep by making it easier to work with large photo collections and to create impressive photo projects that you can share.

Also consider:
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI
This aging photo-editor can still learn a few new tricks

Serif Album Plus 4
An easy to learn package, but pretty limited

Google Picasa 2
An excellent free photo album application

All image editing reviews

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