Photoshop Elements 13 Review - Photo Editing Software
Our Verdict
Elements 13 delivers easy guided photo-editing, fun projects, a creative learning experience and accessible power for more-experienced users.
For
- Intuitive, effective file handling and management
- quick and generally authentic confront recognition
- Guided Edits mode is a fun way to learn advanced processes
- Expert manner offers a broad range of commands and tools.
Against
- Managing folders of pictures not as piece of cake as it could be
- No autocomplete suggestions when tagging photos with names
- Guided Edits often don't have Undo or Redo options.
Tom's Guide Verdict
Elements xiii delivers easy guided photograph-editing, fun projects, a creative learning experience and accessible power for more-experienced users.
Pros
- +
Intuitive, effective file handling and management
- +
quick and mostly accurate face recognition
- +
Guided Edits mode is a fun way to learn avant-garde processes
- +
Skillful style offers a broad range of commands and tools.
Cons
- -
Managing folders of pictures not as easy as it could be
- -
No autocomplete suggestions when tagging photos with names
- -
Guided Edits often don't have Undo or Redo options.
EDITORS' NOTE: A newer version of this software is now available. Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 adds support for selfies, removes haze from landscapes and analyzes photos to suggest tools to improve them. Stay tuned for a total review.
Who it's for: Snapshooters, families, amateur photographers and advanced hobbyists.
Adobe Photoshop Elements may take begun equally "Photoshop-low-cal," merely it has evolved into a mature application with its own distinct personality. The newest version, Photoshop Elements 13, continues in this tradition, delivering piece of cake-to-use guided photograph editing, plus attainable power features for more adventurous or experienced users. Though a bit more expensive than Corel's competing PaintShop Pro X7 ($65-$lxxx), Elements xiii is a more powerful and intuitive program that gets our recommendation.
Unlike well-nigh of Adobe's products, Photoshop Elements is still sold as a perpetual license ($100) rather than a cloud subscription. It is also bachelor in a $150 package with Adobe Premiere Elements (run across review), Adobe'southward excellent consumer video-editing software.
Design and Interface: Attainable yet deep
Photoshop Elements 13'southward tabbed interface is partitioned into two carve up windows with self-explanatory names: Organizer and Photograph Editor. Opening a picture from the Organizer to the Editor requires using a button at the bottom of the screen, rather than a more intuitive double-click on the thumbnail. Otherwise, the interface of each screen is straightforward and clean.
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The optional Welcome screen has big buttons that link directly to either the Organizer or the Editor, plus access to helpful tutorials. (See Learning and Assistance, below, for details.) The three editing modules are Quick, Guided and Good. While each module has a slightly different interface, they all arrange to a like industry standard view: pull-downward menus at the top, a toolbox to the left and command/feature panels to the right. A highly visible ribbon below the workspace displays either the options for the currently selected tool or a Photo Bin containing all currently open pictures.
Organizing Your Photos: Efficient sorting and keywording, plus mobile access
The Organizer module's principal tabs are: eLive, Media, People, Places and Events. Media displays everything in your library, while People, Places and Events bear witness just those photos y'all've tagged for those respective categories. (See Learning and Help, beneath, for data nearly eLive.)
The left panel can display either Albums or Folders. Unfortunately, the Folders don't automatically show all the folders and files of images on your estimator. You have to first "import" those by pointing Elements to specific folders on your difficult drive and then it can create links to them.
The Albums, which are virtual collections of related photos, are quite easy to create and organize, either past using a dialog box or by simply dragging and dropping thumbnails into the Albums. In addition to Local Albums (those residing only on your computer or network), the hierarchy tree includes Mobile Albums, where you organize and view those pictures and videos yous wish to sync with your iOS, Android or Windows 8 mobile devices.
In order to synchronize your Mobile Albums, you need to have the Adobe Revel app on your mobile device and be signed into your Adobe ID account: Both the app and ID are free. As soon as Revel installed on our Nexus Android tablet, the mobile albums synced via our Net connexion, and we were able to browse through our pictures and videos on the device.
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Yous can add keywords to individual pictures or groups of photos by either dragging the thumbnails onto the keyword in the list you've created (which is displayed to the correct) or dragging the keyword from the list onto the thumbnails.
Geotagging (which displays on a map where a photograph was taken) is also a elementary operation. For those photos that don't take geographical information in their metadata (which GPS-enabled cameras provide), y'all can either enter the name of a location in the Place search field or click and drag the photo within the map for a very precise location placement.
When you click on Add People, Photoshop Elements quickly analyzes your pictures and groups them according to the software's fairly good guesses as to which faces belong to the aforementioned person. You lot have the option of giving Elements access to your Facebook friends list to help identify people. Then y'all can exclude any that are a wrong guess. Unfortunately, you can't use a hot fundamental to select several pictures at once that you lot would like to exclude; you must click on each photo individually.
When you tag a photo with a person's name, Photoshop Elements thirteen doesn't use type-ahead to suggest names y'all take already entered or that are in your Facebook friends list. So it won't grab if yous've mistyped a name the second time, and you may assign different names to the same person.
Beginner Editing: Helpful Quick and Guided modes
Quick Editor
Photoshop Elements' Quick editor has a streamlined interface with a limited toolbox. Notwithstanding, dissimilar other simplified photograph-editing interfaces (such as the Adjust mode in PaintShop Pro or all of Picasa[link TK]), Photoshop Elements' Quick toolbox includes selection tools, which permit you to limit the area of a movie affected past an edit. This includes the new Refine selection brush (likewise available in the Practiced module), which makes it much easier to make clean up selections.
Photoshop Elements' Crop tool (also in the Good module) has been redesigned for greater simplicity. When you set the crop to a specific photo size, such as 5 ten 7 inches, or gear up dimensions manually in the tool options ribbon, iv thumbnails display suggested possible crops. Yous can all the same accommodate the crop boundaries manually, and even rotate them.
The panel to the right has tabs for Effects, Textures, Frames and several types of Adjustments: Smart Fix, Exposure, Lighting, Colour Residuum and Sharpen. In the Adjustments tabs, you lot tin click ane of nine displayed thumbnails to apace select a predefined edit level, or elevate a slider for more precise changes.
The Special Effects Quick Edits, such as Vintage photograph, Pencil Sketch or Black & White, are limited to merely v thumbnails each, with no slider.
While many of the commands and tools in the top of screen pull-down menus are greyed out in the Quick editor, the unabridged library of fully customizable filters (similar or identical to some of the sophisticated furnishings available in Photoshop) is notwithstanding bachelor in this mode,.
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In addition, you tin can access the very powerful and fun-to-utilise Photomerge commands (which are an Adobe exclusive and available throughout all three edit modes). These guided projects step you through combining elements from two or more photographs to improve exposure, fix scowls in grouping pictures, take an element from one picture and put information technology in another, etc.
Guided Edits
Photoshop Elements' Guided edit module provides step-by-step guidance on editing processes and creating various interesting effects. The panel to the right is divided into 4 categories: Touchups (Correct Skin Tones, Enhance Colors, Restore Sometime Photo, Remove Scratches and Blemishes, etc.), Photograph Effects (B&W effects, Line Drawing, Old Fashioned Photo, etc.), Camera Furnishings (Depth of Field, Tilt-Shift, Vignette, etc.) and Photo Play (Puzzle Outcome, Reflection, etc.).
Each Guided Edit provides instructions and the necessary tools for following them in i panel. For instance, the new B&Due west Colour Pop creates a black and white image with a fleck of colour retained from the original picture. Footstep No. 1 is to decide what color you desire to retain: Click on the Cherry, Xanthous, Blue or Green icon, or employ an eyedropper tool to select a specific color in the movie. In Stride No. 2, you can refine the effect past using the provided brush (with an adjustable size and opacity) to add or subtract colour areas in the picture. Then in Step No. 3, you can cull to add some saturation to the color.
Unfortunately, the Guided Edits frequently don't take Undo or Redo options, or whatsoever other way to backtrack without starting all over once again. All the same, they are a nifty, fun fashion to learn some rather advanced processes.
Advanced Photo Editing: Good options and controls
The Practiced module provides the widest range of options, commands and tools. You tin customize the right-side panels by nesting or docking the many palettes, such as for Effects, Graphics, Histogram(distribution of light and dark elements in a photo), History and Actions.
The heart of the Expert mode is the Layers palette, where yous can manage and work on diverse elements within a limerick, such as portions of different pictures, type and shapes. Elements xiii'south Layers palette includes creative layers options familiar to Photoshop users, such as Aligning Layers (tonal and color edits), Blend Modes (how layers' pixels will merge visually) and Layer Masks (which select areas of a layer that will be practical to the concluding paradigm). I new function allows you to drag and drop a layer from one pic to another; it works improve than the similar feature in Corel PaintShop Pro (see review).
Photoshop elements works with RAW files, which contain all the original, unprocessed data captured by the camera sensor. When you open a RAW file (either through the File/Open up dialog or from the Organizer), the programme brings it upward in a modified Camera RAW window. It'southward the same utility for processing RAW prototype files for Photoshop CC, though with fewer controls.
Still, the Expert module isn't full Photoshop. Elements focuses on those functions, commands and effects that are most probable to be of interest to consumers. For case, Deportment (predefined macros) are express to more than personal or fun processes, such as "Make four Percentage Thinner," which causes a person to look skinnier. In another limitation, you can't create and salve custom Actions.
Fun Projects: A dainty diverseness with promises of more
Photoshop Elements has a variety of projects you lot can create with your photos, such as a photo book, greeting card, instant movie, collage, DVD jacket or calendar. A cool new Facebook cover creator uses a single picture or several images and some rather squeamish templates to ascertain both your profile and cover photo. Now, Photoshop Elements has only a few Facebook cover templates. However, as the company will be doing with other content within the program, Adobe says information technology will be adding new templates periodically.
Output and Sharing: Flexible and fun
While you tin create projects, share pictures and impress from both the Organizer and Photo Editor, the Organizer has all options, while the Photograph Editor has but a subset. The total range of sharing options in the Organizer includes sending by electronic mail; uploading to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, SmugMug Gallery, Vimeo or YouTube; burning video DVD or Blu-Ray; and creating a PDF Slideshow.
If you print from the Organizer, your options include creating print packages of ii to 20 pictures on a page, calculation frames to the pictures and generating a contact sheet. The impress dialog is flexible, allowing you to drag and drop pictures onto the folio or within the page.
Both the Organizer and Photo Editor have a direct link for ordering prints from Shutterfly. (The offset 50 prints size 4 x vi inches are free.)
Learning and Help
From the very beginning, Photoshop Elements helps users feel comfortable making choices and deciding what to do first. It begins with the Welcome screen, which opens as presently equally you start the plan and provides you the helpful option of seeing an Overview or the What's New section (new features). Clicking on Overview displays a slideshow flyover of the programme, plus Spider web links to resource called "Explore more than Elements features," "View video tutorials" and "Join the conversation (on Facebook)."
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One of the main tabs in both the Organizer and Photograph Editor is for the eLive module. This nicely designed webpage is filled with links to videos and blog posts in 3 categories: Inspire, Learn and News items. While some are niggling more than than advertisements, others are quite helpful. For instance, at the time of our testing, recent Learn mail topics included a video on how to animate a string of holiday lights, and a post from a food blogger explaining some new features in Elements 13.
Unfortunately, the plan's Help, which is found in the Help pull-down card, is non context sensitive (tailored to the specific tool or operation y'all are using). Instead, information technology takes you to the index website on Photoshop Elements, which is filled with links to good articles and how-tos. When you utilise the Search field on that page to try to find the specific reply or guidance you need, you must type in "Photoshop Elements" along with the search subject field; otherwise, it will search and find responses about the entire Adobe product line.
Bottom Line
Photoshop Elements 13 is an excellent, highly accessible, yet powerful consumer photograph-editing program with but a few annoyances. For the vast bulk of users, Elements is a far better choice than the more-complex Photoshop CC or the less-robust Corel PaintShop Pro X7. Elements thirteen delivers on fun, ease of utilize and height-quality results, in an interface that helps users master even sophisticated photo-editing techniques.
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Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/adobe-photoshop-elements,review-2620.html
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