Adobe photoshop element 10 ~ MinShock!! Geek

Adobe photoshop element 10

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Hard to believe, but Photoshop Elements—which we always thought of as Photoshop Junior—is getting close to being a teenager. Now in its 10 th edition, the program started out as a significantly stripped-down version of Adobe’s professionally priced Photoshop. Over the years, it has grown an impressive set of features (many of them the same as in the mother program), appealing to casual and serious photographers alike. The result: The program's now a powerhouse in its own right. Those features include RAW file support, layer masks, and Photoshop’s awesome content-aware editing, which makes removing unwanted elements from most photos a snap. Photoshop Elements 10 also includes many automated adjustment features that its professional sibling lacks, as well as an Organizer module for cataloging photos and videos. Some photographers who already own the full Photoshop CS5 find that the leaner simplicity of Photoshop Elements makes it an appealing companion to the more advanced program. For instance, Photoshop Elements 10 includes a number of automated, guided editing features not present in the more expensive Photoshop CS5, such as the special effect we applied to this photo.. . With Adobe having maintained a yearly update rhythm with Photoshop Elements for a decade now, it’s no surprise that some of those updates have been more significant than others. Photoshop Elements 9’s addition of content-aware editing made it a must-buy for users of earlier editions. Photoshop Elements 10 doesn’t add groundbreaking editing features; its biggest improvements are in the Organizer module, where it beefs up the ability to find specific photos. Also in version 10 , Adobe has finally brought the Mac OS X version to feature parity with the Windows program. In earlier versions, Mac users found their version lacking much of the organizer functionality of the Windows release... Now, the programs are on a mostly equal footing, regardless of platform. The Elements Editor For starters, Photoshop Elements 10 ’s Smart Brush has been beefed up with 30 new effects and filters. You can easily use the Smart Brush to place a patterned backdrop over a distracting background, or to restore color to a picture that’s been changed to black-and-white. The improved Smart Brush lives up to its name and does a better job of differentiating elements than earlier versions did. It makes the formerly tedious process of selecting areas of a photo to modify a simple matter of brushing over them. For example, Smart Brush makes it easy to replace a messy room with a white backdrop—or, say, a pool of water with boiling lava—in just a few swipes of the mouse... Completely new to Photoshop Elements 10 is the ability to wrap text on a path. You can select an object to wrap text around using a Smart Brush– like selection tool. You can also wrap text to a shape (such as a circle) or draw your own path for the text to follow. After you've done one of those things, you just type your text, and it will flow across the selected path. Unfortunately, as you can see in our effort here, you can’t tweak spacing to fix awkward wraps and breaks... Finally, Photoshop Elements 10 adds a trio of overlay options to the crop tool that help you improve your compositions. The Rule of Thirds, familar to most photographers, breaks images into vertical and horizontal thirds. Placing key elements in, say, the upper left third instead of dead center can make for more visually compelling photos. Likewise, the Golden Ratio works on a similar concept, where placing objects along the lines and intersections of the displayed grid can make for a more appealing photo. Finally, there’s a simple grid, which can be useful when rotating and aligning elements in a picture. Here, you can see how the cropping guides can help make a picture more interesting... Guided Edits In Photoshop Elements, the handy Guided Edits are wizard-style editing tools that make it easy to perform certain photo tweaks. These range from common fixes (such as cropping, sharpening, or brightening a photo) to more exotic edits (adding a saturated slide effect, or merging faces from a few photos to create a perfect group shot). Our favorite of the new Guided Edits is simulated depth of field. When taking photos with digital SLRs, photographers can tweak the aperture to create a Bokeh effect, with the background blurred to make a subject stand out. Achieving the same effect is difficult with most point-and-shoot cameras, and it’s virtually impossible with phone cameras. Photoshop Elements 10 does a reasonable job of adding simulated depth of field after the fact. Just select the parts of the picture you’d like to keep in focus, and then tweak the blur amount until you achieve a pleasing effect, like we did here... Another new Guided Edit simulates the Orton effect. Created by photographer Michael Orton, the real Orton effect uses two or more images of an identical scene, shot with different exposures and focus settings on slide film. It combines them to create a dreamy, soft, and slightly surreal image. The Orton Guided Edit modifies a single shot to create a similar effect. It can be useful to create an attractive, unusual portrait... More gimmicky is the Picture Stack effect, which breaks your photo into four, eight, or 12 distinct squares and adds photo borders, making it look like the full image was created from a stack of individual photos. (You can move and rotate the individual photos to tweak the final effect.) The results are cool, but it's not likely something you’ ll use all that frequently... The Organizer The Organizer module, which lets you manage both photos and videos, has seen a number of improvements that make it easier to find and share specific images. The Organizer lets you tag, search, rate, and filter your photo collection, and it lets you tweak color, levels, and contrast, as well as fix red-eye and crop photos—all without having to load the actual editor. You can also create a variety of photo publications from it, including greeting cards, photo books, calendars, and collages. (For these, a wider variety of templates is included in version 10 than before.) As before, you can send these creations to services like Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly, but the latest release also lets you share publications directly as JPEG or PDF files. The Organizer has added a number of new features to help you locate related images. The existing Visual Similarity Search, which hunts for similar- looking pictures by examining both shapes and colors, now finds its way to the Mac OS version as well. The new Duplicate Photo Search function is similar in concept, but it's geared toward allowing you to delete similar photos or stack them together in the Organizer. It works well, and it will match pictures that are similar but not identical, such as versions of a photo that you’ve applied filters to. If you shoot RAW photos, however, note that it will tag RAW and JPEG versions of the same picture as duplicates. In our tests, we found the algorithms aren’t perfect. See this sample, for instance: The top group is visually similar; the bottom photos, not so much.... Photoshop Elements has had People Recognition for a few releases now. This feature automatically recognizes faces and lets you tag the people in them, making it easier to find photos of specific folks later. The initial setup is laborious, as it asks you to confirm a large percentage of photos, and its algorithms occasionally identify objects like armpits and wallpaper patterns as faces. Still, it’s easier than manually tagging the subject of every picture in your collection. Accuracy aside, though, Adobe enhanced People Recognition by adding a new Facebook friends-list import feature. This brings in the names of your likely photo subjects and automatically tags those friends on Facebook when you upload pictures of them. Even though you can download your Facebook friends list to supply names for People Recognition, you’ll still need to match them up... The new Object Search feature is similar to People Recognition, but it lets you highlight any object in a photo and then search for it in other photos. ( The program looks for similar shapes and colors.) You could use this to find all the pictures you’ve taken of a particular landmark, pet, or vehicle. It’s hit or miss in its accuracy—you’ll wonder what it was thinking with some matches—but it does tend to do a good job of putting similar objects high up in the results list, though often mixed with some strange results. It seems to work best when you weigh the results more by shape than color, as you can see here... When we initially imported our Photoshop Elements 9 catalog, we had issues with the visual search feature not working properly, because our collection wasn’t properly indexed. Creating a new catalog from scratch in Photoshop Elements 10 solved this issue. For the visual search features to work, the Elements Auto Analyzer module must examine your collection, a background process that can take quite a while with an extensive library, particularly if you have numerous videos. Once the initial catalog is built, however, analysis doesn’t take long when you add more items to the library. Organizer supports uploading photos and videos directly to a variety of photo-sharing sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, and SmugMug. You can now upload videos to YouTube directly from the Organizer; previous versions required you to use the Premiere Elements editor. Although the services support videos, the Organizer will upload only still images to Flickr and SmugMug, and Facebook video uploading supports only some formats without requiring you to export the videos to Premiere Elements first. For some of this, you can also use Adobe’s Plus service, which offers online photo and video sharing via Photoshop.com, as well as backups of your media. A skimpy 2GB of storage is included with the program; subscribing to Plus for $49.99 a year ups that to 20 GB and gives you access to online tutorials and additional creative templates. Conclusion Photoshop Elements 10 adds support for communication with tablet applications, but as this was written, Adobe hadn’t released Elements- compatible versions of any of its iPad apps . Also, while Photoshop CS5 and Premiere Elements 10 have added 64 -bit versions, which boost performance by taking advantage of additional memory on newer PCs, Photoshop Elements 10 remains a 32 -bit-only program. That’s not typically an issue when working with individual pictures, but when you have a bunch of high-megapixel images loaded, the computer can start to bog down. Overall, this is a super-solid consumer image editor, but it's not a vast improvement over the already-excellent version 9. New effects like the Pencil Sketch Smart Brush (below) are nice, but owners of Photoshop Elements 9 might not find them worth the upgrade price... Owners of previous versions of Photoshop Elements do get a break on pricing, though. Adobe' s new Elements upgrade pricing drops the cost from $99.99 to $79.99 for the individual Photoshop package, or from $149.99 to $119.99 for the bundled version, which includes the Premiere Elements 10 video editor. Previously, Adobe offered a $20 rebate to all purchasers, whether they owned an earlier version or not. Photoshop Elements 10 is very much an incremental upgrade over last year’s release. Many owners of version 9 will not find enough new here to justify even the $79.99 upgrade price. But for newcomers and those who haven’t upgraded in a few years, the substantive features for both manual and automated photo editing make Photoshop Elements a heck of a bargain, whatever the cost.