Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements 9

[Simon]

New professional-grade editing tools and improved hand-holding for beginners make this a superb all-rounder for amateur photographers.

With rivals such as Google churning out the perfectly respectable Picasa for free, Adobe has to work hard to convince consumers to part with nigh-on £80 inc VAT for Photoshop Elements. Borrowing flagship features from the £650 Photoshop CS5 suite is a pretty bold means of persuasion.

Content-aware fill was the standout new feature in this year's CS5 refresh, so it comes as a welcome shock to find it in Elements so soon, albeit in a less powerful form. For those unfamiliar with content-aware fill, it's a means of removing unwanted objects from photos, with Photoshop analysing the surrounding area and filling the gap.

In Photoshop Elements, content-aware fill is added to the healing brush. That means you can't draw neat selections around errant objects as you can in CS5, but instead have to dab away at interlopers or that portrait-ruining tree branch, which is a good deal less precise. Nevertheless, the results are often stunning. Random skiiers ruining a group shot on the slopes and fingers obscuring faces in portraits were among the objects near seamlessly removed in our tests.

Read more: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/361363/adobe-photoshop-elements-9

[Niall]

I always find it strange when PC Pro use two different prices in one article. Photoshop is £650 before VAT. It's £800 normally. They have a strange habit of reviewing things without VAT on their site and in the mag, which I've never understood, as surely more day to day users read it than businesses

[Rik]

I don't know, Niall, but I think they ought to quote the price with VAT and the net if they want to.

[BrianM]

For anyone interested, just thought i'd post this free handy 'Curves'  plugin for 'Elements'  as Elements only has a basic curves function. Don't know if it will be compatable for the 9 version but it should work with all others.

http://www.free.pages.at/easyfilter/curves.html

[Rik]

 

[wecpcs]

For anyone interested, just thought i'd post this free handy 'Curves'  plugin for 'Elements'  as Elements only has a basic curves function. Don't know if it will be compatable for the 9 version but it should work with all others.

http://www.free.pages.at/easyfilter/curves.html

Nortons states that the site is a known malicious web site.

Colin

[BrianM]

Thanks for that.     I can only say  there's no warnings from my security set up though. I downloaded, installed and been using the plugin a few months now with no problems.    

[Niall]

Nothing wrong with that site as far as I can see, and non of my blocking programs spotted anything, and the file download has been scanned by 3 programs and given the okay

It's probably the case that the site got hijacked or injected a long time ago and Norton hasn't been updated with the newer information.

[Den]

I've got Norton 2011 on my computer and that flagged it up as well. I would rather trust Norton than the site 

[esh]

The site is completely innocuous and barely has any javascript. If for some reason you can't open it I can mirror it I suppose.

[Simon]

F-Secure was quite happy with it.