Cliff Joseph,
There's no shortage of photo-editing programs on the market, but Photoshop Elements has retained a big advantage over its rivals thanks to its ability to borrow powerful features from its big brother – the full, professional-level version of Photoshop.
Photoshop Elements 7 continues this trend. More important, though, is the fact that it also manages to present new features in an accessible manner that allows non-professional users to experiment with them quite easily.
A good example of this is the new Scene Cleaner feature, which allows you to quickly remove elements from a scene, such as a pedestrian walking across the frame as you're about to take a picture. You'll need to take two or more pictures of the same scene so the program can compare the details within each scene; Elements places the pictures side-by-side on-screen, allowing you to mark up the details to be removed.
There's also a selection of new special effects, such as the line art effect that makes photos look like hand-drawn sketches. However, the most powerful addition is the new Smartbrush.
Most special effects – such as a sepia tone or turning a photo black and white – are simply applied to an entire photo in one go. However, the Smartbrush allows you to selectively 'paint' a wide range of special effects onto specific areas of a photo. You could, for instance, use the Smartbrush to turn the background of a portrait photo into black and white, while leaving the person in the foreground in colour, or perhaps change the colour of the personís clothing simply by painting onto their clothes.
Some of these tools and effects wonít be required by most amateur photographers, but Photoshop Elements remains the standard against which rival editing programs have to compete.
