Adobe released a new version of Photoshop Elements this week. I haven’t read everything about it, but looking over the "What’s New" section on the website it appears that there is little to get excited about.
The new features and upgrades fall in four main catagories, organize, edit, create and share. These four catagories can be narrowed to two, useful and arts-and-craftsy.
On the useful side, Adobe claims to have improved the panorama feature for blending multiple pictures into a single panorama. Listed as a totally separate feature is improved blending of multiple group shots into a single good good picture. Perhaps what may be the most significant upgrade is speed. Adobe vastly improved the startup time of full Photoshop CS3, hopefully this same improvement has been made to Elements 6. Other vague improvements have been made to the clone tool, brightness and contrast, and the black and white conversion.
While I prefer Picasa for organizing and sorting photos, many people swear by the Elements photo organizing features. Adobe lists improvements to the speed of this feature, if the program opens quickly and thumbnails appear as fast as they do in Picasa, this could be pretty significant.
Now for the arts-and-craftsy features. Adobe has added features for creating photo books and other photo projects that have been so popular from services like iPhoto, Shutterfly and HeritageMakers. These features must be popular because adding arts-and-craftsy features have been the only major features added to each new edition of Elements since version 3.
Perhaps there is a major market for these features, I tend to believe that Adobe has perfected the editing program so much that all they can really do to sell new copies is add more fluff. Call it Vista-izing Photoshop Elements.
