Can Photoshop Elements 8 Beat The Challengers?

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Background Check

Unfortunately, most of my Mac360 friends and family have soured on Adobe’s lack of steady upgrades for Mac users, and have turned their attention to other, often capable, software titles for photo editing.

Fortunately, I’m not one of them, and have owned Elements for years, love it to death, and didn’t have many (some) problems with Elements 6 on my Mac, even after upgrading to OS X Snow Leopard.

That doesn’t mean I’m not miffed at Adobe for letting such a capable application languish behind the Windows version. The school where I work has many Mac and PCs running Photoshop Elements. A little parity would be nice.

New Features

From what I can see, Adobe has done with Elements for Mac what Adobe does best. Add on a bunch of new features. Some are delightfully simple, like a one click full-screen photo preview.

One of my favorites, and sure to get used regularly, is the ability to recompose photos to any size without distorting key subjects. Think about that. It’s a bigger deal than what you’ll conclude at first glance.

Scaling an image is easy. Going from big to small, an image simply gets smaller. Typically, if you grab the left side of an image and scale toward the center, the image distorts. That’s bad.

Photoshop Elements 8 recomposes the image to the new size without notable distortion. That’s cool.

Lighting and Previews

One of the more difficult aspects of one-click digital photography is lighting. The flash can be your friend, or screw up what should be memorable photos.

Elements 8 uses new technology to create what is called ‘perfectly lit’ shots. I’ll believe it when I see it, but Adobe’s Flash videos of these new features are impressive.

Even better is the new Preview function, which gives you a number of differing looks, via an adjustment feature, then choose the best one.

Dental Work

Photo image editing software has had flash red eye elimination for many years. It’s even in iPhoto. Adobe takes it a few steps into the future with digital dental work—teeth whitening.

Why not? Photoshop is used to create totally perfect complexions and skin and teeth for models, so why not bring the technology down to the rest of us. If I can’t be beautiful in real life, why not be beautiful in a photo?

Skin tones can be retouched with a click, the sky can be made even more blue than it is. Again, these are effects that are common among Photoshop professionals, but Adobe is making them easy in Elements 8.

Merge Me

Way back in the day, when Photoshop Elements 6 ruled the day, Adobe introduced a photo merging technology that allowed you to create a single good group photo from two or three bad photos.

That feature has been enhanced in Elements 8 along with the ability to completely remove some unwanted elements of a multi-shot scene. That’s cool, too.

Mixed Emotions

Looking at Adobe’s comparison page for Mac versions 4, 6, and the upcoming 8, I get mixed emotions. First, some of these new features are decent and likely to inspire many Mac users to create even classier photo galleries.

Second, the list does show you exactly what Adobe did in recent years for Mac users. Not much. It’s as if Elements 4 didn’t do much at all, and Elements 6 only did a little more, but Elements 8 is the cat’s meow, and you should buy it right away because it may be the last Elements for Mac users for many years to come.

I’m not enamored with Adobe because I sense that they treat Mac users with a different measure of disdain than their Windows customers (but a measure of disdain for everyone—you can do that when you’re that big). Still, I’m a big fan of Photoshop Elements and look forward to the new features.

After all, Elements is really a not-so-junior version of Photoshop (which retails for $699) and yet weighs in at a mere $99. Come on, that’s a bargain, and helps Elements 8 top the challengers.