Editor's Choice - Personal Computer World.

Photoshop Elements costs a fraction of the price of the full version of Photoshop, but it still boasts more photo-editing power than most of its rivals in the sub-£100 category. It also provides plenty of assistance for newcomers to digital photography.

When you launch Elements you initially see its Welcome screen, which allows you to view a number of introductory tutorials before getting started. If you want to get straight to work you can use buttons on this screen to open individual files, import photos from a scanner or digital camera, or open the program's File browser to look through your collections of stored photos.

Once you've opened a photo you are dropped into the main Elements workspace. At first glance this seems quite spartan compared to rival programs such as Jasc's Paint Shop Pro or Ulead's Photoimpact, which both have interfaces bristling with toolbars and palettes. In contrast, the Elements workspace contains just one main tool palette and a couple of toolbars running along the top of the screen.

The main toolbar running along the top of the screen contains an area called the Palette well. This is the reason that the interface in Elements appears so tidy, as it allows you to shrink several palettes down to small tabs, so you can keep them out of the way until you need them.

Among the tools in the Palette well are two palettes called Hints and How to. The Hints palette is context sensitive and displays detailed information on how to use any tool that is currently selected. The How to palette contains a series of recipes that provide step-by-step instructions on how to perform common tasks, such as correcting colour or brightness, resizing images or preparing images for use on the Internet.

The File browser is also tucked away in the Palette well, so you can quickly open it up at any time in order to search for additional files stored on your computer. There are also two palettes containing artistic filters and other special effects. Elements scores well here, including almost the same range of filters as the full version of Photoshop. There are lots of artistic filters that can make your photos look like hand-drawn sketches or paintings, along with special effects such as motion blur, stained glass and a wide range of distortion effects.

If you enjoy experimenting with special effects then Elements has got plenty to offer, although we'd like to see a larger preview display for the various filters so that you can get a better idea of how they will affect your photos.

The options in Elements for working with layers are extremely powerful. The Layers palette displays all the layers within an image and allows you to hide or show individual layers so that you can home in on specific elements. You can also use the Layers palette to add styles, including drop shadows, bevels or glow effects to both text and graphics. This is handy for creating web graphics. A web gallery function allows you to grab a series of pictures from a folder and create a web page that contains a gallery of thumbnail previews for easy viewing.

Elements lacks many of Photoshop's more powerful tools, such as the Healing brush and the automatic Shadow/ Highlight controls, but there are a few extra features designed to speed up your editing work.

The Quickfix palette allows you to easily alter settings such as brightness, focus and colour balance, and provides before and after previews of your image so you can see how your changes will affect each photo. Instead of Photoshop's History brush, Elements has a History palette that stores a list of all the changes you make to an image and allows you to quickly to back to any previous step during your editing session.

The power of Elements' editing tools does mean that it requires a bit more effort to master than simpler programs, such as Microsoft's Digital Image Suite. However, at less than £80, it provides an impressive amount of editing power at a very competitive price.

Contact: Adobe 020 8358 5857
www.adobe.co.uk

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