Photoshop Elements 3.0

This is the third release of the Adobe Photoshop subset product targeting the home digital photography market. It is a significantly enhanced product since the initial Photoshop LE 5.0 release.

This new version incorporates most of the tools that are required for digital photography editing, printing, archiving and Internet publishing. The program provides capture of images from digital cameras, scanners, most graphic image formats, even from PDF files. Existing Plug-In products continue to be supported.

New print routines allow the selection and printing of digital images in variable output formats, selecting number of image columns and rows and DPI resolution. This supports single images, multiple images per page, and printing contact sheets of whole directories and directory trees of images, providing a convenient method of cataloging your images. It does not provide as much flexibility or control over this function as ThumbsPlus, but should be adequate for most home users. This features uses the scripting language and creates each new page of output automatically. I used to have to do this manually and it was repetitive and very time consuming.

The product makes extensive use of a scripting language to execute repetitive tasks. For example creating all the thumbnails and reduced resolution/resized images to create a web photo album can be very time consuming. Elements has built-in routines that automate this process. Put all your pictures in a directory or directory tree, launch the publish to the web script and it automatically open each image, creates the thumbnail and reduced resolution and resized larger images, creates all the html pages and directories for a complete web site in the specified destination directory. Its not fast, but it will save you hours of effort. And this script creation feature is available to the user.

The tools and user interface have been significantly enhanced. Expanded tool help screens provide useful information on how to use the tools. Common image correction tasks have been grouped together, allowing the user to pick and choose which tasks to execute without having to open each task individually. New tools and expanded options to existing tools have been added.

One of Photoshop's most powerful features is Layers. A great new feature is that Text Layers are now editable. It used to be if you wanted to change the Font or Font Size you had to delete the Layer and recreate it, not anymore. Text Layers are clearly identified and fully editable. A great enhancement.

The drawing tools are still there and fully functional. They allow creating of new images or blending of imported images to create new images, including those cycling GIFS so common on web sites today.

Adobe incorporated features from their PDF product line into this product. You can import images from PDF and you can also create PDF slide shows from your images. The ability to create PDF files is great. The full featured PDF creation tool is an expensive product, and to have a subset of its features incorporated into this product was an extra bonus.