Adobe Photoshop Elements 7

Photoshop Elements 7 Review

Posted 1 year ago - INTRODUCTION: . I'm a first time user of Photoshop Elements or PSE as many call it. So this review is probably different then from someone who upgraded from an earlier version. . . PHOTOSHOP.COM . I understand one of the main differences between PSE 6 and PSE 7 is using photoshop.com. It was my impression that you get the free basic membership because you bought PSE 7. However, anyone can get the free basic membership if they own PSE 7 or not. PSE 7 just integrates with it well. They claim you can access your photoshop.com any ware in the world using the internet. This may not be true because the computer needs Adobe Air installed and an internet cafe is some remote area may not have it installed. I have not used photoshop.com too much so I'll let others review it. However, I found the ads for it while using PSE 7 somewhat annoying. . . THE ORGANIZER . I found the organizer easy to use and very useful. It saves thumbnails of your photos in a database along with other data such as tags you add so you can quickly find photos. You can off load your photos to CD/DVDs when your hard drive starts to get full. The organizer will still be able to find them and show you what that photo looks like from the database. It will then tell you to load the CD/DVD where you save them. . I've tagged my photos with things like events (ie. 2006 Tibet trip), locations, and people in the photo. . People tagging sounds difficult but it is easy with PSE. PSE will find the faces in every picture and give you a little thumbnail of the face which you tag. It has two modes, fast or "more accurate". I've only use the fast mode. It found faces even in news papers people were reading. It also find faces of strangers which you can disregard. Face tagging goes very fast using this feature. . The events and locations are easy to tag. The photos are displayed based on date/time taken. You just select which photos you want to tag. I recommend thinking about this a little before you start. For example, I tag locations based on country. The countries have sub tabs based on regions, and then some of the regions have sub tag for cities. I never tag a photo with a tag containing sub tags. For example, I have Niagara Falls as a sub tag of NY as a sub tab of USA. When I want to find photos from Niagara Falls, click this tag. When I want to find photos taken in NY, I click the NY tag and even when none of the photos are tagged with NY, I get all the photos taken in New York State. . PHOTO EDITING . We all seen photos edited using Photoshop. PSE can do most of these things at 1/7 the price. Even things like removing or adding people or combining group pictures so everyone is looking at the camera without blinking. As a new-be, I've only used the quick auto fix function but I'm looking forward to using the more advance functions as I get more experience. . You can also use any fonts which your computer supports like Chinese or Arabic which are provided free my Microsoft for Windows computers. This is great for making a vacation travel books. . PHOTO BOOKS . PSE directly supports some of the online photo book services but unfortunately, it no longer directly shutterfly.com, the one I like to use. You can edit photos but for page layouts, it is better to tailor what you upload to the online photo book. Shutterfly provides templates for PS which can be used with PSE. But you have to do a page layout for ever page. It is best to use PSE's "Photo Collage" for doing this. Start with a standard collage, and then customize it for shutterfly's requirements. Then do a blank layout and save it. Use this saved layout as a starting point for pages you want to upload. This was a huge learning curve and took a lot of reading and experimenting to figure out how to do all of this. . SUMMARY . PSE 7 is very powerful and a lot cheaper then the full version of Photoshop. PSE will have just about everything and more, most home user will ever need. There is a big learning curve. But there is also lots of help on the internet including forums, free tutorials, and free add-ons.

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