First Look at Photoshop Elements 8

I joined Adobe’s press conference earlier this week announcing their new Elements release  – PSE 8 for Windows and Mac both! I’ve been so excited since then for the actual release date so that I could share some of these cool new features with you.

One of Adobe’s goals for this release is to automate the boring parts of “family memory management” so that we can spend more time on the fun photo enhancing and scrapbooking edits. Apparently, the typical Elements user likes spending time on photo edits that make people say, “How did you do that?!”  That would definitely be me.

The biggest automations will be visible in the Organizer.  Look for:

• Management of videos as well as photos from within the Organizer, in response to capture devices (meaning cameras) that record both photos and videos
• The Auto-Analyzer  will automatically tag your images with tags like Group Shot, One Face, Close Up, In Focus, Blurry,Too Dark, etc. and will assign Quality and Interest ratings based on these tags.  This will be a great feature when you want to separate all the people shots from the landscape shots in your Grand Canyon vacation album, or when you’ve got tons of shots to sort through and need a head start on the best pictures to start with.  (Zoom in on these screen shots to get a good look at the new features!)

• People Recognition – this was the coolest part of the demo, in my opinion.  The Auto-Analyzer automatically separates out the images that have faces in them, and prompts the user to identify each face.  After 5 to 10 instances of naming the same person, the Organizer learns to recognize that face and will identify other pictures of that person in your catalog.  The subject that was used in this tagging example was a teenager.  The Organizer was even able to recognize her face in photos that that were several years old.

  

In the Editor, there are two new features that sound quite useful.

• Have you ever needed to crop out the middle of an image? I actually needed this feature last week.  Say that your two subjects aren’t standing close enough together.  If you cut out the space between them, the background will look funky unless you do some serious cloning.  No more!  Elements’ Recompose Tool will fix that problem.
• The newest addition to the Photomerge family of features is Photomerge Exposure.  You know those shots where you need one exposure for the subject and another for the background?  Take two separate pix, each at its ideal exposure.  Photoshop will combine them into one great image.

Premier Elements

I’ve never found the time for much movie editing, but Premier Elements sounds very tempting to me this year.  The new Smart Trim feature automatically trims out useless footage.  Like the 30 seconds aimed at the soccer goal waiting for your player to bring the ball into range.  And the Smart Mixer automatically turns down the volume on music that you are adding to your video whenever anyone is speaking.  Perhaps I will get my home videos organized after all.

It’s intelligent features like this that are making the Elements products incredibly easy to use this year.  We will be spending less time on the boring organizational work and more applying the “How Did You Do That?” features.  I’m looking forward to it!

Coming up next, by reader request, is a tutorial on editing multiple photos at the same time in Lightroom.  Thank you for subscribing to Texas Chicks Blogs and Pics!

Ready to Read More?