Adobe Photoshop Elements 9

The full Adobe Photoshop has long been the best professional image-editing program, with Photoshop Elements the cut-price option for home users.

As with previous versions, Elements 9 is really two applications packaged together. The Organizer is a photo library into which you can import images directly from a camera memory card.

As before, there is the option to tag photos with keywords and names to make them easier to find, with Elements scanning your photo library for faces to name.

Photos can now be sent straight from the Organizer to Facebook – useful if you want to make a quick album for friends. It worked well although there isn't much to recommend the Organizer over Google's free photo software, Picasa. In fact, Picasa is slightly easier to get used to.

Back in Photoshop Elements, the Edit section is where you edit pictures, unsurprisingly. At their best, the tools here are only slightly less complex than in the full Photoshop, but the power of Photoshop Elements means those tools are made easily accessible.

There are Quick and Guided editing modes, the former giving a variety of sliding controls that affect different aspects of photos such as shadows, midtones and highlights, or that add sharpening or alter the picture’s white balance.

The Guided option is more useful, spelling out in plain English the changes available, then walking you through steps to make them.

For the first time, Photoshop Elements includes content-aware fill, a handy way of removing items from photographs and having Elements fill in the space behind the removed item by guessing what the background might be from nearby elements. It didn’t work flawlessly, and much depends on the user doing a careful job, but it nonetheless means you can remove people and distracting objects from photos without needing to learn any hard techniques.

Another potentially useful tool is the ability to show Elements an image and to apply its style to your own shots, meaning you could show it a classic black and white landscape shot and a similar one of your own, then have it imitate the former’s style and apply it to your picture. Sadly, the effects are applied rather clumsily so the resulting pictures are predictably nowhere near as good as the professionals’.

Luckily, Elements is a great place to learn. For those who have never edited an image before it offers the perfect amount of hand-holding, and those keen to learn will find plenty of headroom to customise and perfect images without spending a fortune.

For new users, it’s pricy and if you don't want to do much editing, Picasa is a better bet. However, anyone keen to learn more about photo editing and have total control over their images should consider Photoshop Elements 9 money well spent.