However, Quick Fix does contain a Touch Up menu, whose one-click fixes include red-eye correction, making blue skies bluer, converting to black-and-white, and, new for this version, teeth whitening.Įlements 7 features several new editing tools, and given how robust they are, the full editing menu remains easy to navigate. Using sliding gradients, users can adjust the shadows, highlights, midtone contrast, saturation, hue, temperature, tint, and sharpening.
In fact, it's manual editing for people who are strapped for time. You might think that Quick Fix means the mother of all Auto edits: one click and you're done. If you choose Enhance Colors, for example, the sliding scales for hue, saturation, and lightness will show one-sentence explanations for these terms.
When you click on one of these options, you'll get on-screen explanations and can preview your changes.
The menu in the right-hand pane titled, "What would you like to do?" has a list of task-oriented options, including Enhance Colors and Correct Skin Tone. True to its name, Guided Edit is for novices. It's important to know that at any time you can click the Organizer button in the upper right-hand corner to return to your photo catalog you can pick up where you left off when you return to the editing screen. Photoshop Elements edits nondestructively, always saving a copy of the original photo. But below that are links for Quick Fix, Full Edit, and Guided Edit. By default, the options listed are automatic: Auto Sharpen, Auto Contrast, and Auto Red Eye Fix, for example. When you find a picture in the viewer that you want to edit, you can click the Fix tab in the right-hand pane to begin editing. When we expanded our query to "flower Nikon," it showed only the photos we took with our Nikon point-and-shoot. When we typed in "flower," all of the photos which had flower in the caption showed up. Users can even add audio captions, although these, of course, will not translate to searchable keywords. However, we found it much easier just to write captions for photos. From the right-hand organizational pane, users can manually create tags, even adding icons to them, and place them under one of these umbrellas: People, Places, Events, and Other. As soon as you start typing, Elements begins narrowing the results. Photoshop Elements already supports photo tagging, but now users can search for photos using a live search bar in the upper left corner of the window. Also here are two icons that let users rotate photos. Users can also sort by date, using a drop-down menu. Above this grid, and to the right of the static task-oriented tabs, described above, is a sliding scale allowing users to adjust the size of the thumbnails. In the upper right corner of this grid is a master row of stars accompanied by a drop-down menu, allowing users to sort photos by star rating.īy default, Elements 7 shows only the most recently imported photos, but you can click Show All to view your entire catalog. Once imported, photos appear as a grid of thumbnails, with a row of five blank stars underneath (to rate a photo, just roll the cursor over a star and drag it as far right or left as you want, depending on how much you like the photo).
Like Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate, Elements 7 supports RAW photos. We do like that when you import photos you can check a box authorizing Photoshop Elements to remove red eye automatically. However, when you click File > Get Photos you can opt to have the program search selected drives or folders. Unlike Google Picasa, which prompts first-time users to scan for photos on their hard drive, Photoshop Elements' users have to import photos themselves. But as with other Adobe products, the small icons' purposes aren't always obvious until you roll over them with your cursor. We like that despite how many features the program boasts, there's still plenty of space for editing and viewing photos. Otherwise, the rest of the interface-the hierarchical tabs, the icons lining the left side of the screen-change depending on what you're doing. Once you enter any of these areas, you'll see a static pane on the right side of the screen, which has tabs for Organize, Fix, Create, and Share, so that you can move between these tasks with ease.