Feature: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 - first entry into the Photoshop family
Motivation: Further polishing of the powerful entry level Photoshop tool

For a long time after the success of Adobe Photoshop, the company tried to develop an entry level system which would not give away the Photoshop family jewels but at the same time would serve as entree into the Photoshop-way of doing photo editing. For many years this reviewer thought that Image Ready would be turned loose as that entry level system. But no, a sucession of tools just did not offer the real deal - Photoshop Limited Edition (the name tells the story) was too simple or too different (Photoshop Album)from real Photoshop. Image Ready would have been perfect.

Well finally Adobe hit the spot with Photoshop Elements which was a combination of ImageReady Lite (close and powerful enough in basic Photoshop functionality) plus a built in image browser. Photoshop Elements provided a low cost entry point ($100-150) for those unwilling to pay the Photoshop $600+ price or not willing to invest the time that Photoshop's large learning curve demanded. So lets take a quick look at what Photoshop Elements delivers to users as a starting photo editor. In two words,it is: fully loaded.

The Photoshop Elements Basics

Photoshop Elements is really two programs - the Organizer (the image browser side ) and the Editor (which provides for a full range of photo editing - masks, layers, filtering, etc). What Adobe has done in Photoshop Elements is interweave these two programs very well.

The Organizer
When Photoshop Elements starts up its splash screen offers users a choice of 4 basic operations:1)Organize, 2)Fix, 3)Create, and 4)Share. Except for Fix all of the other operations start out by running the Photo Editor. In the screenshot above , I show the basic layout of the Organizer. It has 3 major areas. The Thumbnail Browser displays images imported from 5 major sources:

1)a scanner;
2)an external camera or flash card;
3)a file or directory on disk;
4)a mobile phone;
5)a search of a local hard disk, or chosen netwerk files and directories.

But look to the right, there is a complete Photo Operations Panel to help users also make quick photo fixes too. Arrayed across the top of the the Photo Operations Panel are 4 colored tabs at its top - Organize, Fix, Create, Share. I have chosen to display the Fix tab to show the range of photo editing operations available. The first six commands from Auto Smart Fix to Auto Red Eye Fix work with one or more images and do the correction immediately to the image; however by pressing CTRL-Z any operation can be undone.

But the most important options are the Quick Fix, Guided Edit, and Full Edit options. Each one of these buttons start up the second Photoshop Elements program the Photo Editor which I cover in detail below. For now lets look at what the other tabs allow a user to do in the Organizer.

The blue Organize tab allows a user to add one or more images to a)to a user created album, b) to share with others on a website or in an email , and c)to add keywords to any rankings they have already made to the photos. It is this latter feature that I would like to focus on.

Classifying Your Photos

One way to classify and organize photos is to split them of into separate albums - and of course, Photoshop Elements allows users to easily do so. But an equally effective way to categorize your photos is to add keyword tags. Photoshop Elements does this well by allowing you to not only rank images with a 1-5 star system; but also add keyword tags to individual images and then filter images by what tags they have attached to them. So the tags+filters become virtual albums.

Here is how to work with keywords. In the Organizer choose the blue Organize tab and the screen layout will look like the screenshot above. Photoshop Elements has a set of four default keyword categories - People, Places, Events, and Other. It is simple to add additional categories to the keywords. I have added Scenics as a category plus Newmarket and Warkworth as sub-categories to Places (again see the screenshot above). All I had to do in the latter case was highlight the Places keywordand then press the green + sign. A menu popsup and I clicked New SubCategory. Clicking on that and a dialog pops up letting me enter the name Newmarket and then indicate it was a subcategory of Places. Ditto for Warkworth. Its that simple.

Now here comes the clincher. Say you want to do what I wanted to - add a new Place => Ontario. And then make Newmarket and Warkworth as sub-subcategories of Ontario. Uhoh - could be trouble. Not at all. Just + add Ontario just like the tags before. Then drag and drop the tag icons for Newmaket and Warkworth onto the Ontario tag icon - and the fixes are done. Now adding the Warkworth(or any other tag for that matter) is just a simple drag and drop of the tag onto the photo(s).

Now to filter the images by keyword just double click on the keyword tag or drag and drop the tag onto the line "Find: Drag keyword tags, albums, photos, videos, and projects here to search" at the top of the thumbnails. Double click the keyword tag again to turn it off from filtering. When you are working with hundreds of photos in a project - keyword tags are a real time saver. Yet maintaining keyword tags is trivial. To delete a tag, just highlight it and then click on the garbage can just to the right of the green + icon. Or right mouse click the tag and choose the Delete Keywords Tag option. To edit the keyword tag, either click the pencil-and-paper icon or right mouse click the tag and choose the

This is typical of the Organizer and Photo Elements in general. Adobe have gone out of their way to make operations simple to do and often provide two or even three ways to accomplish a task. I appreciate that because it means I and many otherts can often guess how Photo Elements will work.

I find the keyword-tag based albums easier to use in many circumstances. Perhaps that is why Smart Albums can be quickly created from search filter results. There are a lot more capabilities in Photoshop Elements Organizer and we shall cover the Create and Share tabs in more detail below.

Create and Share Tabs

The one major mistake in Photoshop Elements is how the Organizer does not hand off well to the Photo Editor to support both the Create and Share tab features. When you click one of the Create or Share options like Photo Book or Calendar in the Organizer, it should automatically open the project bin and ask the user to choose from the Organizer thumbnails of the pictures to be used in the Create or Share project. Then when the user clicks Done, Photoshop Elements would launch the Photo Editor and take the user into the Create or Share task with the project bin loaded with photos ready to go.

What Photo Elements currently does is launch the user into Photo Editor and it loads the Project Bin if you have remembered to preselect your images. If you haven't, you must go back to the organizer and drag and drop tthe images you want to use into the Project Bin. This is certainly workable, just clumsy.
The Create option offers 5 creative projects for Photoshop Element users to do. Photo Book allows the user to create an album of pictures for publishing through a third party vendor with between 20 to 8o photos. Photo Calendar allows users to create a calendar with a variety of layouts, again published through XXXXX. Photo Collage create aseries of photos that the user can print locally that can be styled in a manner somewhat similar to the Photo Book. Online Gallery allows one to create a website using your chice of images and styling. Fnally Slideshow provides the same facility- styling of images for a your own customized slideshow.

The second major problem I encountered in this review has been the fact the Online Gallery and Slideshow both bombed every time I tried to launch them from the Organizer. I rebooted the system and made sure that Photo Elements was the only program running - still no luck. Online Gallery would run if launched from the Photo Editor but not Slideshow. Since I am running Windows XP with SP2 I expect that Adobe will have the problem cleared pretty quickly.

In this section, I follow Photo Book to give users a feel for how all the Create options work.

All of the Create options icluding Photo Book are automatic wizards that lead users step by step through the process. In the case of Photo Book users first choose a opening image and book template. The template determines how images will be mounted and framed on each page. In the screenshot above I chose two images on the lefthand page and one on the righthand page. I would like to be able then set the position and size of the frames in the template and have them applied to all of the pages. This feature is not there yet. But users can go to any image and adjust the size and positioning individually.

However Photo Book does give me a wide choice of page background themes so I can apply a coinsistent page theme throughout the book. Or again I can add individual themes from the wealth of artwork that Photoshop Elements provides users and jazz up the look of specific pages. See the wild and wooly I have applied in the screenshot.

Note that most of Photo Edit's filters and image adjustment commands are grayed out(and therefore unavailable)when working with a Create option like Photo Book. However, users can add Text to any or all pages which can be quite effective. Also the Artwook panel provides a wide selection of predrawn shapes and images with such themes as Christmas, Sports or Travel among dozens of choices. In sum, not just Photo Book but all of the Create options provide users with a broad set of photo finishing choices.

Once you are done with PhotoBook (and Calendar too), users can then order the finished book (or calendar) online.

The Share option shares one choice with Create - an Online Gallery. But it has 4 other options for sharing your images. E-Mail attachements allows users to gather together a selection of photo an easily add those to an Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express or Adobe EMail Service posting.

The Photo Mail option appears to do the same thing; however since I use neither Outlook or Adobe EMail Service I cannot confirm the quality of the service. What I would really like is smilar to what Adobe's online Photoshop Express or the NYTimes blogs provide - email directly shipped and delivered with minimal effort on my part - just a few addresses and a note attachment. That would be very much appreciated.

In the case of the next two options I can say more. Order prints allows users to do exactly that from Kodak EasyShare Service. I was surprised that Adobe was only supporting just Kodak at this time. Given the wide and vigorous competition in the online printing market, I would have expected more options here.

Finally the CD/DVD option allows users to output to a CD or DVD selected images. I was surprised that other Create and Share options did not allow CD/DVD output. But apparently only the Online Gallery output can be shared to CD/DVD back up.

Summary

We have barely scratched the surface of the full Organizer set of features for Photoshop Elements. In the Library step I am able to import RAW or other images from most cameras and storage devices (there in fact is a problem of overzealousness). I then can deliver those images with new naming plus a full set of IPTC, EXIF, and other image metadata codings including color, star and other tags to one or more directories on a system . But what many users will appreciate is the ability to rate and tag their photos and then sort/filter for just the photos that match chosen tags and/or ratings. This is quite powerful.

In contrast, I was a bit put off by the instability I found in the Create and Share options. I know that Adobe has a closed viewpoint about sharing their wealth with 3rd party print services. However, for Online Gallery and Slide Show features to a)not start up and b)be clumsy in passing data between the Organizer and the Photo Editor, that was a bit disconcerting. Again, this maybe reconciled in short order when Adobe updates the program. But it is worth noting as readers consider the second half of the review, the Photo Elements Photo Editor.
March 23 2008 Update note: As predicted, Adobe has corrected the image passing problems and has also increased the speed of operation in subsequent updates that are pushed down to automatically to registered users. However, I am leaving the original reviews comments as an advisory of what to expect on first release. PhotoShop Elements has become a very large program with all its features and the need to sync among them.; so be forewarned on early updates.