Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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446 of 466 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best product available for the digital photo taker, September 29, 2004
This product finally gets it right. From start to finish, it really works.
Connect a camera or card reader, and it automatically finds it and imports your photos. Then do a quick review using your full-screen so you can really see the image, not just thumbnails. Cull out the lame photos really fast, then tag the ones you want to keep. Even hit Ctrl-1 through 5 to put 1-5 stars on an image.
Then once you have your best shots, use the cool "smart fix" tool to do some amazing stuff to fix the exposure and colors in just one click....much smarter than the other products I've tried (and I've tried a lot over the last 3 months, including microsoft's and magix and ulead and nero....etc.)
Then use the one-click redeye remover to click near an eye and have the redeye automagically removed. It really works! Cool!
Use the Healing Brush to remove blemishes and paint out annoying details (like the cars in the background, or a blemish on someone's forehead) without having to know anything special or hold down a control-shift-alt key combination.
Wonderful organization tools, plus the world's best image editing, all packaged in a UI that starts simple and builds as you explore it.
Adobe really got this one right. Don't bother looking at the other packages (lord knows I spent enough time for us all. :)
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88 of 91 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Good Gets A Bit Better, December 10, 2004
I knew it would happen.....the healing brush hits Elements 3.0! Great addition to a good program. Can the channel mixer be far behind? Probably....if Adobe adds that and curves, there may not be a reason to get the full-blown Photoshop for most people. I do photography professionally and most of my stuff is done in Photoshop CS, but this is a great backup program. There are some things in here that I don't use, but they're handy for the average digital image taker. I'm not wild about the incorporation of Photoshop Album into this, but again, it has some useful features that the market this program is geared to will find nice to have. The better option would have been to allow this to be a separate installation. I have a file management program that I like that will allow me to open any file in whatever program I choose, so I don't need the file management part of Elements 3.
All in all this is a great program that can do a lot of serious stuff if you take the time to learn it. To the gentleman that said in his review that there was no full-screen because there's tools all over the place cluttering things up....well, do your homework. There is full-screen, and if the tools get in your way, try hitting the tab key. I'll bet you'll see the tool bars go away. Hit tab again, they're back. That's one great thing about Photoshop....lots of keyboard shortcuts to do all sorts of things.
If you're debating new imaging software, give this a try. It's all-encompassing for the average shooter, and you can do just about anything you need to with your images.
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77 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Triumph of Marketers over Programmers, April 3, 2005
Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 was a tremendous breakthrough for the casual digital image enthusiast. With a huge portion of Adobe Photoshop's functionality, it was for the average photographer all the program he or she would need. The weakest part was it's photo browsing and library management. These failings were addressed with the release of an ancillary program, Adobe Photoshop Album. While not to everyone's liking, Photoshop Album was powerful and very well designed, and together with Elements made a comprehensive set.
With the release of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, Adobe has pulled a fast one on its customers. Instead of adding significant functionality to PE, it has given it lots of what programmers call "chrome" - the shiny bits of the user interface. It has merged in the features of Photoshop Album, but this is useful only to those who don't already have Photoshop Album.
For your money, the upgrade to Photoshop Elements 3 offers, essentially, one new tool: The healing brush introduced in Photoshop 7. While the healing brush sounds great, I found it to be inferior to careful use of the 'good old' clone stamp tool.
Given that I was not won over by Photoshop Album, was unimpressed by the healing brush, and don't care much about chrome, I found the net advantage in this upgrade to be nil.
On the downside, however, users get plenty. For one thing, each time you want to edit a photo (Photoshop Elements) or work with a library of photos (Photoshop Album), you must load both programs. Remember, in version 3 they have been combined. It would not be accurate to say this adds twice the load time and overhead; it seems to have added more than that. Photoshop Elements 3 is slow where 2 was fast, bloated where its predecessor was lean. It is, however, very, very shiny.
I have tried Photoshop Elements 2 and 3, Photoshop Album, and Photoshop 7. Having tried all these, I now use Photoshop Elements 2. For managing my library I rely on ACD System's ACDSee, far faster and more flexible than Photoshop Album.
I can't recommend this upgrade; it offers almost no real new features, and the addition of Photoshop Album is only of interest to Photoshop Album fans. The programmers at Adobe must have been working on other projects; this upgrade seems to be the work of the marketing department.
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