Feature: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 - first entry into Photoshop family - Part II
Motivation: PhotoShop Elements Photo Editor features are reviewed here - $99US

Photoshop Elements 6 might be thought of as the Swiss Army knife of photo editing. I have examined the overall design and Organizer side of the program here and found it to be one of the most comprehensive tools in the photo album market. But in doing that review I found Photo Elements so crammed with features I had to do a second part, the review here on all of the Photo Edit features. In this review, I found that Photoshop Elements and its Editors are really loaded with a very complete feature set - equal to and in some cases better than such programs as Corel PhotoPaint, Ulead/Corel Photo Impact, and Gimp. And importantly Photo Elements is much faster and more complete than the new set of Web based tools like Splash-up and

In this section I shall examine the Editor side of the program with its three modes of operation:

1)Quick Fix - for fast, easy photo corrections - and training wheels for Photoshop Lightroom

2)Guided Edit - for step by step help through photo editing - first steps into photo edits

3)Full Edit - uses many features from standard Photoshop - also an intro to full Photoshop

Summary of Photo Elements Review

Note that Photoshop Elements has some unique commands that are often simple substitutes for Photoshop or Photoshop Extended commands. But as can be seen from the table, Photoshop Extended has a considerably larger command set, especially in the Edit, Layers and Image commands. Approximately 40 of these commands belong exclusively to Photoshop Extended. Most of those are in 3D, Motion Graphics and Video editing, and Medical/Technical Measurements (see Photoshop Overview for the details).

So Photoshop alone will be a major step up for Photoshop Elements users. If you find the learning curve for Photoshop Elements intimidating (and many do), then consider Photoshop Extended as the Mount Everest of graphics programs. Fortunately, Photoshop Elements does provide a lot of help to get users up to speed in Photo Editing.

Photoshop Elements: A Helping Hand for Photo Edits

Photoshop Elements has a good set of Help facilities which will be examined in more detail below. But lets face it - photo editing can become a very complicated business very quickly as the table of commands above show. What the folks at Adobe have done is make the photo edit process very approachable in Photo Elements. To do this there are three graduated edit modes which help users learn editing - Guided Edit for the absolute neophyte who needs step by step assistance. Then Quick Fix uses a Photoshop Lightroom approach which is very comfortable and easy to pick up. Finally there isFull Edit- which can be thought of as Photoshop Lite as it uses many of the same menus, commands, tools, panels and dialogs familiar to standard Photoshop users as shown in the table above.

The next important aid to learning is the fact that many of the panels and dialogs used have their own specific Help commands. This means users get taken directly to the relevant help items - no clicking blindly through the Help files. In addition, Adobe provides a number of Online Web help tools including a glossary of terms, videos demonstrating key Photoshop Elements concepts and operations, plus the complete and latest Help reference publicly available on its website - go here to verify the latest on how to do it in Photoshop Elements.
Finally, Adobe has an army of 3rd party books and websites that provide free (like thePhotofinishes.com) and for a fee books, tutorials and other tips on using Adobe products including Photoshop Elements. Try O'Reilly or Peachpit Press for books - and besides thePhotofinishes.com, check out our Adobe links page for other Web sources.

But be realistic, Photo Editing has a huge variation in its level of difficulty. To do some of the most advanced edits and photo compositions can involve dozens of layers, many special effects/filters, and even combining 4-5 separate images. Or it can be as simple as a Crop, Lighting change, one Retouch and you are done. What Photoshop Elements does is provide for this widely varied requirements by providing three different Photo Edit modes as noted above. So lets try each in sequence below.

Photo Edit - Guided Edit

Photo Edit - Guided Edit provides the very opposite of the Full Edit tab - a simple interface (the toolbox has only two tools) and special written instructions for each major edit. These are special instructions, because clicking one will launch a dialog that takes the user through the task - say Crop Photo or Remove a Color Cast. The only two tools users have to be concerned about are the magnifying Glass for enlarging or reducing the image in the edit Window and the Hand tool for moving the image. Very simple.

The trade-off for this simplicity is only the tasks listed below are available for Guided Edit. Yes, these are some of the most common and important tasks of photo finishing; but for guided editing, this is all you get. However, guided edits are really quite helpful. I like to use them for three reasons.

1)They are quick and tell me exactly what to expect from some of the more advanced edit tools. For example, Enhance Colors shows me what the range of Hue, Saturation and Lightness commands will do for my image - and very quickly.
Click the Reset button in the lower right corner and the image reverts to how it looked when you started the edit. And if worse comes to worse, just hit the Cancel button to exit instead of Done - and all edits done in this step will be cancelled.
3)Like Quick Fix, Guided Edit provides three View modes during editing:
  i) After - shows just the changed (but not yet finalized) image
  II) Before, After Horizontal - shows the image before and after in horizontal layout
  II) Before, After Vertical - shows the image before and after in vertical layout

- Basic Photo Edits include cropping, rotating and straightening plus sharpening.
- Next comes Lighting and Exposure corrections using Lighten/Darken and Brightness/Contrast.
- Color Corrections, often tricky to do, follow with Enhance, Remove Colorcast, Skin Tone edits.
- Guided Activities take you through a complete photo edit session, step by step.
- Photo Merge is a good start at high end combining images into one composition.

In sum, Guided Edits are a way to do quick edits and tests for what basic editing is required. Often for tough tasks like Remove Colorcast I use Guided Edits to get close and then do the final changes in Full Edit. However, for those brand new to photo finishing, Guided Edits are the way to start out learning what are the important tasks of photo editing, what order to do them in and what to expect that Photoshop Elements will allow you to do in finishing your photos. This is a tremendous learning aid.

Photo Edit - Quick Fix

Think of Quick Fix as Photo Edits on training wheels. Note the toolbox now has five tools available for editing. In addition the right panel is laid out in the same fashion as in Photoshop Lightroom when you are in Develop mode there. So users anxious to get to know Photoshop Lightroom have a training facility in Photoshop Elements much like Full Edit helps users to learn full standard Photoshop or Photoshop Extended editing.

But perhaps the two most important aspects of Quick Fix is 1)it takes users deeper into the world of Lighting and Color fixes and 2)it introduces the use of selections or masks to do selected edits to a portion of the image - not the entire image as in Guided Edits. For example, in the screenshot, a raw image just out of the camera shows much less orange-red vibrancy then when I took the original picture. Instead of using the Saturation slider which will make all colors deeper and more saturated, the Temperature slider will allow me to warm up the red-magenta tones in the picture.

Now another thing I saw when the picture was taken was the deep Hunter green on the tree. This is almost completely lost. However, by using the Quick Selection tool (3rd down from the top of the toolbox - it looks like a wand with a marquee rope attached), I can select just the tree. The Quick Selection tool has just graduated up to full Photoshop and is the best masking/selecting tool by far. The tool allows users to 1)create a new mask/selection; 2)add to an existing mask; or 3)subtract from an existing mask.

I use the "add to an existing mask" mode even though there is no mask there yet - the Quick Selection tool will just create a new mask in this case. This allows me to do the masking carefully in several steps. I did have to use the subtract mode in a couple of places where the first try went over into the glimpses of sky within the tree.

So now with just the tree selected I can do my edit steps - and they will only be applied to the masked/selected areas. All the rest of the image will be unchanged by my Lighting and Color edits. The first edit I apply is to Lighten the shadow areas. Then I add more Saturation with the result that the dark greens now add an offset to the sky's red orange. But the most important point is that the sky color and tones were unaffected because the applied masks insured that changes were done only to the tree.

Finally, Quick Fix gets users used to one of the hardest operations to do well in photo editing - sharpening. People have unrealistic expectations on what sharpening can do and I blame it on TV and CSI:Miami. You know the scene - they have a picture of the getaway car - its a bit grainy. "Can you focus in on the license plate?" And so they zoom in on an even more grainy and blurred licence plate. "Is there anything you can do to clarify that?" And so the techy reaches for his Harry-Potter-Magic-Wand tool, and suddenly a hopelessly blurred and grainy license plate is perfect readable. BZZZZZZZT, no way Jose.

Just take a blurry picture, choose Quick Fix and the Sharpening option. Move the slider to all the possible settings and see what happens. First, one will see that if the image is even slightly motion blurred or out of focus, there is not a lot that Sharpening can do (hence the value of a good and fast auto-focus and jitter compensation systems in your camera). It is only pictures in the 3 to 6% blurred range or less that Sharpening can really help.

But also note that sharpening is destructive. It adds usually white pixels at the automatically detected edges of images. Some sharpening tools also increase the contrast in the image as well. If you apply sharpening across the total image, some very fine tonal gradations can be easily lost. You really need to use masking tools with most sharpening operations. So maybe the best lesson from using Photo Elements Quick Fix is that not all photo corrections are quick fixes. At this point you will be ready to try some of the features of Full Edit.

Photo Edit - Full Edit

I am constantly amazed at what Adobe puts into Photoshop Elements - Full Edit. The current 6 version is as good as (if not better than) full Photoshop 6 (the current version of Photoshop CS3 is 10). For example, Photoshop Elements 6 users get the new and very powerful Quick Selection tool for masking with 2 of Refine Edges 5 mask adjustments. This puts Photo Elements users in a league of their own versus competitive photo editors.

But also if you check the Common commands and tools shared by Photoshop Extended with Photoshop Elements in the table above, what is remarkable is the number of shared commands, particularly the core capabilities. Only in Layers, Views and Image/Enhance does Photoshop Elements fall seriously short of Photoshop Extended and its many new high end features. But if you look at Selections/Masking, Filters, and the Toolbox Photoshop Elements has many of the same commands and tools.

If you consider, the basic edit workflow outlined in the Quick Fix mode, Photo Elements does very well. It is easy to import images from a wide array of devices and various graphic filetypes (including many camera raw formats). Then Photo Elements has all the tools to rotate, straighten, crop, and resize the images. However, in the arena of Color and Lighting corrections, Photoshop Elements does not have the high powered tools like Curves, Channel Mixer, Exposure and others reserved for standard Photoshop. Photoshop Elements has taken an Auto-approach to Color and Lighting fixes - making them easier to do in many cases; but more difficult for some of the refined exposure corrections.

Likewise the Sharpening tools are very helpful but not as powerful as in standard Photoshop which has added capabilities with the Sharpen Edge and Smart Sharpen commands. But with use of good masking, one can compensate somewhat for these shortcomings. And as noted, the selection commands in Photoshop Elements are nearly equivalent to standard Photoshop. This includes the new and powerful Quick Selection and Refine Edges capabilities. Finally, with Filter Gallery and nearly the same set of Effects, refining an image in Photoshop Elements could not be easier.

To my surprise, I find when I am doing a number of tasks like preparing images for use with Organizer's Create Calendar or Create Greeting Card I just work all the way through in Photoshop Elements. And I flit between the Full Edit and Quick Fix editing modes and find them more than adequate 90% of the time. And now for my websites images I find I like working in Photoshop Elements because of the Project bin - the strip of working photos along the bottom of the workspace. With a click of the mouse I can Hide/Show the Project bin so it simply does not get in the way. I would love to see the Project bin in standard Photoshop but it to work as fast and as smoothly as in Photoshop Lightroom.

Finally, do not discount the ability of Full Edit to help in learning how to use standard Photoshop. I must admist that it was working in Photoshop Elements Full Edit with layers and selections I began to appreciate how to use the equivalents in standard Photoshop. As you can see from the Differences table, the menu and toolboxes do not exactly correspond, but alot of the basic edit operations are interchangeable. So this raises the question, when should one move up to Photoshop ?

When to Graduate to Full Photoshop

I am constantly asked this question and I have addressed it partially over in the Photoshop Overview. Also in this review I have mentioned that the move up to Photoshop Lightroom is triggered when you are processing about 50 photos per week. I stick with that and would highly recommend to Photo professionals to use both Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop Elements or full Photoshop or the pro editor of their choice.

So when to graduate to full Photoshop ? Well here is my set of necessary conditions. No one condition is sufficient; but if you experience most you are ready to graduate. First, if you find yourself using Photo Elements Full Edit much of the time and like working with it, that is a good sign. Second, if you find Photo Elements falling short in such areas as 1)retouching/recovery of images, 2)handling images with wide exposure range (HDR candidate images), 3)doing fine print and color control at least twice a week, 4)needing more non-destructive editing of images, 5)doing precision combination of images (panoramas and collages) or 6)layering is just falling short of your needs - then a move up may be timely. Third, if you edit images either 20 or 30 times per week and then find that you have to go outside of Photo Elements more than a third of the time to get the job done - this is a definite graduation indicator. Fourth, if you find yourself spending more time to automate with Actions, History, or Scripts your operations in Photoshop Elements then Full Photoshop may be the place to be.

But remember, full Photoshop has a huge learning curve even with the benefit of training on Photoshop Elements. And finally consider that standard Photoshop costs 6 times as much as Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Extended is 10 times - so make certain that the investment will have a sure, money in the pocket return for both the time and cost of graduating to full Photoshop.

Summary

Now here is my argument of why Photoshop Elements may be perfect for you. It bears repeating, Photoshop Elements 6 Full Edit alone is nearly equivalent to Photoshop 6 of just 4-5 years ago. To this you add Quick Fix and Guided Edits for largely trouble-free basic photo editing. Next consider that Organizer provides a tool to organize image processing projects like making a greeting card, designing an original calendar or putting up a gallery website. Finally, if need be, Photoshop Elements get users used to the tools and commands of full Photoshop - all for a street price of $110US or so. You do the math.