The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 Gordon Woolf gordon@worsleypress.com |
Adobe Photoshop is still the program to which most would-be graphic artists aspire. But it is now a $1500 program and I find it hard enough to find the three hundred dollars or so for every second upgrade.
So what does Photoshop Elements offer at around half the price of just an upgrade to the program it is modelled on? It may offer all you'll ever need and, here's the surprising part, a number of extras that cut down on Photoshop's steep learning curve. Forget the idea that this is a dumbed-down Photoshop.
Elements is being marketed as a middle-of-the-road image editor aimed at the gap between entry-level programs of the kind that come with scanners and digital cameras, and the professional programs for those who spend all day every day at this kind of work.
It offers several levels of step-by-step help without presenting it in a way that will make the user ashamed to have someone looking over his or her shoulder. It certainly works that way for me. I spend most of my time at the computer in layout programs such as InDesign or PageMaker, or in a Web program like GoLive or FrontPage, so, when I go to Photoshop for all but the most common tasks, I find myself struggling to work out what to do.
|
|
|
Therefore, surprising myself, I have found myself opening Photoshop Elements as a first choice. It
shares the internal (.psd) file format of Photoshop, and shares many of the high-end tools and third-party
filters.
I have switched off the initial Welcome screen, with its choices of New File, Browsing, Connect to Camera
or Scanner and so on, but there is plenty of less obvious "novice" help.
First up it looks like Photoshop, and the two best sources of help - the Hints palette and the Recipes
palette - look exactly like Photoshop palettes. The Hints palette changes every time you click on a tool,
giving a brief description and one or more links to greater help. The Recipes palette lists steps to do
tasks and for many it offers "do this step for me" options, though again it is discreet. It never shouts
"look how easy this is".
|
|
When you click on a tool, all the options are in the option bar near the top of the screen - and change
to suit the tool.
Dialog tips are to be found throughout the program, discreetly at the top of dialog boxes and "Smart
Messages" almost make it a pleasure to do something wrong - at last someone has taken the trouble to
write meaningful error messages that tell you what you've done wrong and link to more extensive help.
|
I don't mind being told, for example, "Could not complete your
request because the area to clone has not been defined (control-click to define a source
point)" with the word "clone" linking to a definition of that process. Take the example of colour management, a daunting task that scares me. Elements doesn't take the easy way out - full colour management is still built in - but there's a midway choice: "Limited color management - optimised for Web graphics" with some well written advice available from the Help button on the dialog box that offers that as one of three choices. There are a range of dialogs to change photos, and there is also
a Quick Fix dialog that combines many of the possible adjustments with Before and After views and,
again, plenty of hints and tooltips. |
|
Trying to achieve a mask to work on parts of a picture or to achieve a cut-out background is achieved in
Photoshop with a variety of tools but many professional users fall back on the Quick Mask, that applies a
red semi-transparent overlay to the non-selected part of the picture. This works well because professionals
have been brought up against a background of the Rubylith overlay that was manually cut away with
a scalpel. In Elements the same effect is achieved with the Selection Brush that allows the user to paint
in a selection, or to switch to the mask mode and paint a selection mask. Again it is Photoshop simplified
but in an understandable way.
Among other tools added in Elements is the Photomerge command for combining pictures into a panorama. It
was there in Version 1, but, to be honest, it now works, with automatic or semi-automatic straightening or
cropping.
|
|
|
The File Browser is somewhat slow in comparison to IrfanView, which is on every Melb PC Monthly CD, but it will do a few things that program won't do, like giving details (though not a preview) of PDF and EPS (PostScript) images and allowing these to be opened in the program by rasterising the image (i.e. changing it from a possible vector image, a drawing, into an image made up of dots like any other photo - and you can do this at any resolution (or number of dots per inch).
|
Elements does not have the ability to work in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), although it will open
CMYK images in a conversion to RGB (Red, Green, Blue). This limits the program's use for high quality
printed output, and is the reason why the professional will pay for the full program. But photo prints
from generally available inkjet printers are likely to work in RGB mode anyway and the Web only requires
RGB. Even so, this program may suit the small business user who is aware that your printer or print designer will need to convert any picture files you output and that there may be slight colour shifts in the process. Elements does not have the ImageReady program, once independent but now bundled with Photoshop, but it does come with a Save for Web dialog that allows most of the optimisation of images possible with ImageReady, even a limited ability to create animated Web images. It also does not create clipping paths such as can be created in Photoshop itself but you do have tools to get rid of backgrounds, and the file formats intended for Web use offer transparency without resorting to the hard edged option of clipping paths. The street price of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 is around $179 but watch for some special offers and for bundling with scanners or cameras. |
CMYK - RGB Those mysterious letters CMYK and RGB - what do they mean? RGB The colours you see on screen are created with three beams of light - red, green and blue (RGB) - that, when all are on, produce white light, and when all are off, produce black as an absence of light. Various mixes of all three produce imitations of most other colours that our eyes can see. This is called subtractive colour because in the total you have white and you produce the other colours by taking something away. CMYK Colours on paper or any solid surface, are usually produced by also using three colours, but in this case they are cyan, magenta and yellow, that, in theory add together to produce black. In reality they produce a dark muddy brown, so black is used to add depth and create a real black with various systems of replacing combinations of the other colours with a percentage of black to avoid putting too much ink on the paper. Black is referred to by its final letter, K, to avoid confusion with blue and so is referred to as the Key. |
About the Author
Gordon Woolf gordon@worsleypress.com is a long time member of Melb PC and an author of several books on
publication production.
Reprinted from the November 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
