Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 review
October 25, 2004
By Galen Fott
PC Magazine
Adobe has taken two sibling applications, Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Album, and combined them into a single solution that will meet all the needs of budding digital photographers. The result, known simply as Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0, is a complete digital-imaging package comprising the Editor component, for fixing up images, and the new Organizer component, for cataloging and searching your burgeoning digital photo collection.
Elements 3 boasts both a redesigned interface and easier access to powerful tools. New image-editing tools include Photoshop’s amazing Healing Brush, which lets you easily remove blemishes and imperfections from photos. There’s also an easier-than-ever tool for removing red-eye, and built-in support for the Camera Raw format. Meanwhile, a new Quick Fix mode offers an even simpler interface to Elements—it’s a perfect choice for image-editing newbies.
These two components are still applications that launch separately, but Adobe has done a great job of getting them to work together. Elements 3’s Welcome screen lets you pick which component you want to launch first; whichever you choose, there are handy buttons in the interface to launch the other component at any time. You can use Organizer to find a specific photo and then send it to Editor with just a click. Once you’ve touched up the photo, you can save it in a ‘version set’; this saves the revised version while also preserving the original. When you’re done, Organizer will keep the images together as a set.