Product Description

This upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 is suitable for users of the following products: Adobe Photoshop Elements 1 - 6, Adobe Photoshop Limited Edition, Adobe Photoshop Album/Starter Edition, Adobe PhotoDeluxe.

Make ordinary photos extraordinary with Adobe Photoshop Elements 7. The best-selling consumer photo-editing software, Adobe Photoshop Elements has everything you need edit, organise and share your pictures in one powerful yet user-friendly package. Easily improve and perfect your images; fix flaws, add incredible effects and create perfect photo composites. Find photos in seconds with keyword tag or date searches, and create personalised albums or interactive web galleries to share your favourites with friends and family.

Effortlessly select an area and simultaneously apply incredible effects with a single stroke of Adobe Smart Brush. Click to enlarge.

See all your photos in one convenient place where you can scroll through them, apply visual keyword tags, and view and retrieve them fast--even if your library includes thousands of photos. Click to enlarge.

Easily upload photos to your website, iPhone, or CEIVA Digital Photo Frames, or view them on your TV.

Edit

New Smart Brush Tool--Select and transform specific image areas with a single sweep of a brush; get whiter teeth or bluer skies in seconds. Includes eight libraries with a choice of over 50 effects.

Easy and Advanced editing options--Correct colour and contrast or remove red eye in seconds, or retouch and fine-tune your photos with step-by-step Guided Edit assistance.

New Photomerge Scene Cleaner--Has a passer-by walked right through your perfect picture? With Photomerge Scene Cleaner you can take two or more shots of the same scene and simply brush away unwanted elements to create a faultless composite.

Photomerge Group Shot--Never let a frown or closed pair of eyes ruin a group photo again. Photomerge Group Shot lets you easily combine the best facial expressions and body language from a series of group shots to create your perfect picture.

Organise

Tag photos by keyword--Tag pictures by people, places or events, then instantly access all your photos of someone or somewhere by clicking on their/its tag.

Find photos faster than ever--Find photos in a flash using tag keywords, dates and other file information with the new search box.

Create

Design your own photo books--Quickly and easily create your ideal photo album with simple options to flip through pictures, view threads and rearrange pages. Add professionally designed, colour coordinated layouts and a range of frames or artwork effects for a personalised finish.

Step-by-step creative guides--Use your photos to create cards, scrapbook pages, CD/DVD labels and more with easy to follow on-screen instructions.

Share

Build and share unique online albums--With a choice of dynamic, animated templates you can create visually stunning online showcases for your shots. Adobe Flash® technology lets viewers interact with your photos for an entertaining experience.

Sharing Centre--E-mail photos, burn to CD or create online galleries from one convenient location. Create e-mail sharing presets to regularly update family and friends with new pics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1002 in Software
• Brand: Adobe Systems Inc.
• Released on: 2008-10-13
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.97" h x 7.87" w x 9.84" l, 11.02 pounds

Features

• Produkt Version: 7.0
• Sprache: E

Customer Reviews

A great photo editing package for home users - but not an essential upgrade for version 6 users
Presently on PcPro's `A-List', Adobe Elements is a cut down version of Adobe's £500+ Photoshop/Photoshop Extended CS4, and costs considerably less while still having a lot of useful photo editing capabilities. Photoshop CS4 has a steep learning curve, but Photoshop elements is far more home-user friendly. A lot of the program is geared towards image storage and management of the photos on your hard drive, helping with emailing, web output and scrapbooks of your images. The program can auto-downloads your images from the camera to folders, set up using the date, and can even process the images, say automatically removing red-eye, while it does it. Using stacks you can set up image databases [smart albums] using keywords like names, places, events, etc.., and you can even search using visual tags within the image. That said, I shun the image database options offered by Photoshop Elements and Extended, preferring the simplicity of logical folder names instead. Also, like PhotoShop, the image database side isn't seamlessly integrated into the image editing side [to the point where it's actually annoying]. The trendy charcoal 'white text on grey' interface is also style over function, you find it harder to read than black text on white, and more importantly to tell which photo window is active - professional PhotoShop CS3 users are far better served with standard Windows colours.

New to Elements 7 is a new Quick Fix tool to soften surfaces while keeping the edge and detail sharp - i.e. a blur tool, which can help to remove unwanted image noise. Plus there's a new Scene Cleaner tool that can brush away undesirable objects from a photo [so you can ditch that car or tourists from the view] and there's now a Smart Brush which lets you instantly apply effects to a selected area of the image. Plus Element's 7 sports a new single step `whiten teeth', 'make grass greener' and `make the sky blue' tool - but this is little more than streamlining tools within Quick Select and Adjustment Layer Presets that were available on Elements 6. Besides Adobe's suggestion of using the tool to whiten teeth and add a suntan to say Aunt Doris's face may make her look a little ridiculous. Also new in Element's 7 will be a free subscription to Photoshop.com, a special service Adobe has devised to bring friends together by providing quick access to on-line backup, storage, and sharing capabilities. You get 2GB of on-line storage, `enough for up to 1,500 photos', so you can view your photos from virtually anywhere. Thus Photoshop Elements goes `Facebook', allowing you to share your photos `in fun, interactive ways via invitation-only'. For these `Online Albums' you will get new [quite fun] animated templates delivered to Elements on a regular basis. There will also be a Photoshop.com ` Plus' membership offering 20 Gb [15,000 photos] of on-line photo storage, but that will require you paying an annual fee. The first year's 20 Gb subscription is included in Adobe's `Elements 7 Plus' [but not this standard version].

All the old Elements tools are there as well. For editing you have a set of 'quickfix' options or you can load the full image editor for greater manual control: such as adjust sharpness, correct camera distortion, levels, hue and skin colour. Naturally you have standard tools like crop and adjust image size (pixels) as well. You can now do things like brush away wrinkles with the spot healing/healing brush, use clone overlays, make improved B&W images, add image vibrance and clarity, make composite pictures, copy and even blend parts from different images [to say swap faces from a series of photo's so that all your kids are smiling at the camera in one image, i.e. using the PhotoMerge tool]. You also get a layers palette for composites, shapes, text effects and frames. Plus there are step-through guides [guided edit] to help you get there. The software will also integrate with scanners twain interfaces if you are into scanning film, and the Fill Light [shadow/highlight] tool is pretty essential for bringing out detail in shadows from any slide/negative scan. Plus Elements can handle RAW camera images, although I use TIFF/jpg (Elements can save in any common image format).

System requirements are quite high: CD drive, 1Gb system RAM, XP or Vista, 2GHz processor, and a Direct-X 9 graphics card [and Adobe installers can reject systems that don't meet the minimum spec]. Elements 7 perhaps isn't a crucial upgrade from Elements 6 or even 5, but for new home users, or those with older versions, it's very powerful photo editing and image database software from the market leaders. The new 'Scene Cleaner' tool should have been the 'killer app' for those considering upgrading, but it is little more than Elements 6's old PhotoMerge Group application and it requires a series of photos where one has the background free to copy across [and it sometimes gets the exposure wrong making the added bit look rather obvious]. Sadly Adobe's upgrade pricing makes this an expensive option, as typically a full licenced version is only £10 more.

Adobe Elements 7 has only two real competitors at the price: Paint Shop Pro X2 and Serif PhotoPlus X2. Both these programs are also excellent and worthy of consideration, with PhotoPlus's strength being it's about as powerful but rather cheaper to buy and upgrade. Likewise Corel Paint Shop pro X2 occasionally offers a bit more than Elements [layer masks, and curves], is also cheaper and a tad easier to use, although it can be buggy [not Adobe's strong point on first version release either - so install those patches]. Professional users and some SLR enthusiasts will still head towards Adobe's semi-automated PhotoShop Darkroom 2.0 and the fantastically expensive Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended, although even at work we have Adobe Elements on a few imaging workstations for casual users, where the high cost of PhotoShop CS4 Extended simply isn't justified. That said experienced Photoshop CS4 users will rapidly find Elements 7 lacking in a few key features they are used to.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 is also available to buy as a cheaper double pack with the updated Adobe Premiere Elements 7 video editing software, which should be even better value than this upgrade. Plus this double pack qualifies for a large educational discount for non-commercial use if you, or a child in the house, are in full time education [from primary school to college]. Similar large educational discounts apply to much of Adobes software. Those buying for College/School department use will save even more.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7
I purchased the upgrade to take me from Version 4 to Version 7 of this software and it was easy to install and didn't take too long. It first verified with Adobe that my Version 4 was legal and then went through the process of installing. What surprised me was that it left Version 4 untouched and usable and actually just done a full install of Version 7 after the verification, this meant I could have paid a lower price if I hadn't bought the upgrade as Amazons prices were set at the time.
It is certainly different than Version 4 and some things are in different places on the tools and menus than I am used to but in all the changes seem to be very useful for editing. I have not been using the catalogue facilities as I do this with other software that I have but they look to be very useful. One dissapointment is that I put together quite a lot of audio/visuals under the "Create" options and it still doesn't include the opportunity to output a presentation direct to CD or DVD that can be watched in the normal way on a DVD player and T.V.set. That apart, so far I am happy with the software and have set my file associations up so that all image files open directly in Elements 7.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 (PC)

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7
I upgraded from Elements 4 and found there was no handbook in upgrade just a booklet so use of new features not demonstrated. Though there is a guided view as well as quick and full, I often prefer to sit with a book and work it out.
Apart from that I took courage and installed it myself instead of being a wimp and leaving it to my husband to install! It installed like a dream and works well with Windows Vista. I find the smart brush tool interactive and especially useful when things are not so defined in an image, and you can bring up the layer to tweak ad infinitum.
I am well pleased.