Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you... The baby brother of photo editing behemoth Photoshop turns 10 years old this year, and celebrates by releasing version 10 - Adobe Photoshop Elements 10, to give it its full and official name. As ever, it's aimed at photographers who do want to edit their photos to their heart content, but without having to shell out the full cost for a lot of features most people would never actually use.
Powered by the same engine as Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements 10 utilises "intelligent technology" that is designed to make it easier to give everyday photos a boost. The technology is brought to life through easy-to-follow steps for achieving lovely photo effects in an approachable way with new Guided Edits. These include innovations such as creating a shallow depth of field or designing an interesting layout of snapshots with Picture Stack, or even adding a dream-like diffused glow with the Orton effect.
New text functionality, has been added as well, to appease the scrapbooker audience, including curving, flowing text to a photo that automatically follows the outline of a subject, custom path or shape. In addition, special crop guides now help users create appealing compositions.
Keeping your photos organised - and then sharing them
Perhaps the biggest news in this evolution of Elements is the additional attention given to organising and sharing your photos.
Object Search automatically finds objects within photos, such as a landmark, flower or pet. The Elements Organiser can also automatically detect duplicate or near-duplicate photos so users can clean up and delete the photos they don’t need and quickly group similar collections of photos. If you shoot video, you're in luck, too - your clips can be uploaded directly to Facebook or YouTube.
Whether users are social networking or using sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or Photoshop.com, Photoshop Elements 10 helps you share your photos directly from within the Elements Organiser and view them from virtually anywhere on the go, offering a comprehensive set of sharing capabilities for today’s increasingly social and mobile worlds. For Facebook lovers, Elements even integrates users Facebook Friend Lists for easily tagging photos that can then be shared directly to Facebook. Nifty stuff.
It's available now from your local Adobe website, for windows and mac. Or, if you're so inclined, you can toddle over to your nearest brick-and-mortars software peddler to pick up a nice boxed copy.
The illustration photo in this post is (c) Adobe.