Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 [OLD VERSION]

by Adobe

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00005AATF
• Item model number: 49230059
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 5, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,212 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #19 in Software > Graphics > Image Capture
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

By merging Photoshop sophistication with tutorials and newbie helpers--and offering it at a pocketbook-friendly price--Adobe has created a cool tool for digital shutterbugs. Based on Photoshop 6.0, Photoshop Elements trims the most advanced features from Photoshop and replaces them with buckets of user-friendliness.

The interface, which will feel immediately comfortable to Mac users, is full of hints and helpers. By default, the workspace contains a dynamic hints window that displays nuggets of data and links to more detailed help for each tool your mouse cursor passes over. Tabs displayed above the workspace function similarly to pull-down menus: clicking on one opens a window which covers functions such as file browsing, displaying image revision history, applying effects and filters, and so on. Some even act like Windows-style wizard tutorials.

The most wizard-like among these is the Recipes window, which walks users through the software's hundred or so image editing options with step-by-step instructions. Recipes included with the program deal with the most pedestrian of tasks like color correction and image rotating, all the way up to daring endeavors like colorizing black-and-white photos and creating animated GIF files. More recipes are available via download.

Behind all of these simplicity-centric goodies is a powerful and feature-rich image editing program, and it's crammed with every bit of functionality we've come to expect from Adobe. Ready to deal with every image file format one would likely encounter, its layer management is topnotch (even compared to Paint Shop Pro 7). Photoshop Elements is also able to pare image file sizes down and prep them for immediate Web posting, and its real-time, text-on-image editing is second to none.

Granted, the application lacks some of Photoshop's functionality, such as the ability to output files in CMYK format, although it is able to read CMYK files. Alternately, some of its unique features will make Photoshop owners jealous--like the incredibly smooth Photomerge, which creates a single panorama out of a series of overlapping photos.

If you're looking for a comprehensive, intuitive, and affordable photo editor, Elements proves it can play with the best of them. --Joel Durham, Jr.

Amazon.com Review

Designed "with the needs of midrange digital-imaging nonprofessionals in mind," Adobe's Photoshop Elements is a professional-quality image-editing package at an extremely attractive price.

Elements is not a limited version of big brother Photoshop--in fact, there are very few Photoshop features that Elements doesn't offer, and it has been redesigned to include plenty of straightforward editing tools suitable for the novice or business user. To aid people who are less familiar with image editing, the new Recipes palette provides step-by-step tutorials to guide you, allowing the user to grow increasingly adept. A "do it for me" button accompanies some of the steps, bringing up the tool in question for each process.

Many features will be familiar to Photoshop users--the floating toolbar with brushes, the background eraser for removing background details while leaving your foreground image intact, and the Save for the Web command, which generates just the right-size GIF, JPG, or PNG image for your Web page. Each of the vertical toolbar tools in Elements is accompanied by a unique set of options below the main menu bar that relate to the selected tool. Select the Clone Stamp, for example, and the toolbar offers choices for changing the clone stamp's size, tolerance, and more.

Adobe has added several appealing tools. One such item, PhotoMerge, lets you stitch multiple shots of an area into a single panorama. You can also straighten and crop photos that are scanned askew, auto adjust for brightness and color saturation, and brush away red eye. These added features make it ideal for users with digital cameras and scanners. There are other additions, too, like the new File Browser tab that shows a thumbnail of all the images in the current folder, in addition to displaying examples of filters and special effects on your selected image. A nice update to the Undo command is the History palette, which tracks each step in your editing process. A slider bar lets you move backwards or forwards incrementally through the history, letting you decide which steps to keep.

You won't find color separations, CMYK, or other acronyms and functions meant only for publishing pros. On the other hand, Elements offers plenty of exporting and printing options for sharing your photos in print or on the Web, such as a Picture Package feature that automatically generates multiple versions of the same image on a sheet of paper, with 20 layouts from which to choose. You can also generate a contact sheet for printing thumbnails of all the images in a folder. You can also send images directly to Shutterfly.com via the program's new Online Services wizard. Shutterfly lets you create glossy prints of your images, e-mail them to your friends, or print them on greeting cards. Because of the ability of Elements to download new services in the future, other Adobe partners may eventually appear in this wizard. All in all, this is an extremely good value package, and one that, unless you need professional-level color separations for printing, should provide all you need for digital-image editing. --Simon Priestly

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

137 of 138 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars been there, done that, buy this, May 20, 2001

By 

mister_t42 (Andover, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I am an avid amateur photographer, with the emphasis on amateur. I am on my second digital camera (Canon G1, first was Kodak DC480), and I've been printing my own digital photos for almost 2 years.

During that time I've tried many packages, from Photoshop LE, to QImage, to Printshop, to PhotoDeluxe, and I've never been satisified. What I wanted was a solution that gave me reasonable control over the process while still making it simple. I was beginning to feel that I wanted too much until Adobe released Elements.

In my opinion Elements is the Holy Grail for the average amateur digital photographer who wants to print AND edit photos. Now if you have no interest in EDITing your photos, then spend your money elsewhere (Qimage is a good start). Or if you are a professional or a web graphics jockey then go with the latest version of Photoshop. Otherwise, buy this.

Elements makes the process as simple as you want it to be. With many one-click functions, you can trim to size, adjust levels (color spectrum), Sharpen, and print. The hardest part is Sharpen, but after a few trial experiments you'll find settings that work for you most of the time (or buy a 3rd party add=in, like the Nik Sharpen Pro solution that I purchased).

Save yourself some aggrevation. Adobe got it right with the 1.0 version of Elements. Buy it.

71 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular product, December 21, 2001

By 

Doc JC (Beaverton, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I've been using Photoshop Elements for a couple of months now, not only for photoediting and printing, but also for design of backgrounds for web pages. Photoshop Elements is primarily used as part of my business (I use it in the design of marketing materials and art for webpages).

The program is a perfect fit for serious hobbyist. It also meets the needs of business users who are cost-conscious and do not need the full power of PhotoShop. Most of the programs features focus on delivering useful graphics and photo enhancement tools to the user. PhotoShop Elements provides few few kitschy filters and tacky borders that so many bundled programs force on users, apparently in the belief that most of us want to use photoeditors to send fun-house images of the family pet with purple and yellow flowered borders to all our friends.

PhotoElements offers an immensely powerful suite of tools focused on the results desired by the serious hobbyist (which is not to say they haven't included their a few of their own kitschy folders). While PhotoElements offers a wide variety of filters and special effects, most of the filters have a meaningful professional purpose, the filters produce excellent quality results, and most offer the users a high degree of control over the special effects.

Unlike some bundled packages, PhotoElements works nearly flawlessly. It seems to manage memory well and I've never had a crash while using the program.

PhotoElements paper user guide is excellent for a program in this price range. The only criticism would be that I found the on-line help, which downloads directly to the Internet, somewhat clumsy and poorly structured. It seems difficult to formulate search terms that get the desired result and for someone on a dial-up connection I would think this would be a painfully slow way to access help (I have high-speed cable).

This software offers extraordinary value for the price. It offers at least 70-80% of the power of Photoshop for little more than the price of a game. If you buy a digital camera, purchase and install PhotoElements before you waste disk space on the bundled photoediting software that came with your camera.

This was the best [inexpensive]software purchase I've ever made.

63 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic product, July 14, 2001

By 

Mike (PA, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I must say that I was highly skeptical of this software at first. I have never been a fan of "lite" products. Photo Deluxe was, in my opinion, a poor excuse for image editing software. I was afraid this was just going to be Photo Deluxe 2. I was wrong. Elements has the tools that the amateur/hobbyist needs. I'd even venture to guess that most web developers could get by with this as well. Those familiar with Adobe's pro version of Photoshop will likely not miss a thing. In addition, I've found it to be much faster that Paint Shop Pro 7. I run a 950 Mhz AMD Athlon, and PSP just feels sluggish. Elements is very responsive.

I won't go into all the features that I think make it an excellent buy, but the one that stands out is the photomerge. It allows you to take several individual photos having overlap and stitch them into a panorama. I had some photos like this that I took years ago on a trip, and I seriously doubted the software would be able to stitch them together. It worked flawlessly with no tweaking or fooling around. In about 1 minute they were seamlessly merged.

In addition to this, I've found it very easy to use. I've been fooling around with the pro version of Photoshop for several years, and I never knew how to use 30%+ of the features. Elements guides you through without insulting your intelligence.

If you're joining the digital photography masses with the purchase of a scanner and/or a digital camera, this is a "must own" piece of software. Forget Paint Shop Pro or the junky stuff that came with your imaging device and just buy this. It's easy to see why the pros have been such big Adobe fans all these years.