By Michael Muchmore It's that time of year again, when all the photo and video software comes out in shiny new versions. Adobe Photoshop Elements, Photoshop CC's little brother and our favorite enthusiast photo-editing software, is anything but an exception: Its annual appearance in new guise is as predictable as the first NFL kickoff of the season. This year's entry, Photoshop Elements 12, is not a massive overhaul from version 11; instead it adds a lot of mobile integration with the creative software makers' Revel online service, as well as several new dazzling photo effects. One thing hasn't changed—the price. At $99 standalone or $149 bundled with the Premiere Elements video editor, Photoshop Elements remains a great value, especially compared with its elder sibling.
Installing
Photoshop Elements is not a small app. On my system, it takes up a massive 2.6GB of disk space, so make sure your hard disk has plenty of headroom. By comparison, Corel PaintShop Pro X6 (, 3.5 stars) uses 345MB. Elements is available for both Mac OS X and Windows, but there's still no native 64-bit version, something that would be helpful as mega-megapixel cameras' file sizes continue to grow. Installing is a multi-step process that involves first downloading and running the Adobe Download Assistant and then requires a reboot. This review is based on the Windows version, running under 64-bit Windows 7 on a Core2 Duo 3.17GHz PC with 4GB RAM.
The Revel Revelation
Adobe's Revel has been around since its rechristening from the company's Carousel online photo service—plus mobile apps. For a long time, it's been a source of puzzlement to me why they'd use this service, which originally was only available for iOS, when iCloud Photo Stream offered a more integrated experience. But indeed it has advantages: first, it lets you upload video as well as photos; second, you can decide what to upload on a file-by-file basis—iCloud Photo Stream is all or nothing.
If you decide to become a Elements 12 user, Revel becomes far more useful. A new left-panel Mobile option in the Organizer app lets you access any photos in your online galleries, create new ones, and drag and drop photos into them. If your Adobe account has any Photoshop.com or Carousel albums associated with them, they'll appear in this Mobile section. Free accounts allow 50 photo uploads a month, and for $5.99 a month you get unlimited uploads. Mobile apps sync all your Revel photos, so anything you edit in PSE can be instantly available on your iOS or Android units. A key distinguisher from iCloud Photo Stream is that you also get web galleries, which you can share with contacts, another is that video as well as photo content is synced.
New Photo Editing Tricks
All of the previous version of Photoshop Elements' many, many photo manipulation tools remain in version 12—layers, smart brushes, gradients, face recognition, geotagging maps, filters, HDR, panoramas, camera raw—the whole nine yards. And though you might be forgiven for thinking with that plethora of tools there was nothing new to add, the wizards at Adobe have come up with several very clever and useful new tricks in version 12. Of particular note are content-aware move, the new Auto Smart Tone (a sort of auto correct with user adjustability), and new guided edits for creating puzzle pictures, a zoom burst effect, and restoring old photos.
Auto Smart Tone. Don't try to pretend to Adobe that you don't use autocorrect—they've got the data. Since autocorrect is such a popular tool—who wouldn't want to fix a photo's brightness, contrast, and saturation with a single mouse click?—Adobe has given Elements users more control in version 12. You can still use the individual Auto button in the Quick edit view's Smart Fix tool, and the auto buttons in Levels, Color, and Sharpen. But if you choose Auto Smart Tone form the Enhance menu, you'll get some say in how the image is corrected.
Auto Smart tone opens a window with thumbnails of four correction options in the corners. At the center is a circular control (think of it as a "joystick") that you drag around towards the adjustment you prefer. The center is the program's best guess for the type of image you're using the tool on, so in many cases that will look best. If you do change the joystick postion, Auto Smart Tone can remember your preference for that type of photo.
Content-aware move. This one comes directly from Photoshop's box of magic-seeming tools. If you'd like an object in your photo, say, a kid, to be closer to another object, say, a parent, then content-aware move is your best bet. It lets you select the object, and reproduces the background to replace the area where it used to reside. When I tried this, the background wasn't perfectly simulated, but a few strokes of the healing brush produced a thoroughly convincing result. Another fun trick with this tool is that you can duplicate your subject by choosing its Extend mode.
New guided edits. In between Photoshop Elements' Quick and Advanced modes come Guided Edits. These ease the creation of those splendid images that professional designers laboriously craft with complex layers, and effects.
Zoom burst is a striking effect that's pretty difficult to pull off in the conventional way—you zoom out the camera lens while shooting a subject, who's likely to be moving, since this is usually an action shot-type effect. Photoshop Element's new Zoom Burst guided edit simplifies the process drastically. The guide first has you crop to put the subject in the center, and then simply adds the dazzling radiating streaks. Two more refinements let you add a focus area and a vignette, and I must say my zoom burst of a baseball player was intensely striking.
One serious and one fun tool round up the new offerings: Old Photo Restore and Puzzle Effect. The restore photo guided edit brings together tools like healing brush, clone stamp, blur, and spot remover. It's not instant like some of the other effects, but with a little effort you can get a damaged old photograph looking smooth and clean. The puzzle effect is in the Photo Play group of guided edits. This one is pretty simple, automatically cutting your photo into puzzle pieces that you can move around at will. Of course, it's creating selections and layers under the covers, making what would be a painstaking task in Photoshop a snap.
New Quick Effects. In this Instagram world, the far more powerful Photoshop Elements can also compete in the instant effect game. New buttons along the bottom of Quick Mode offers ten one-click effects, like scary movie, cross-process, pencil sketch, cross-process, and vintage. Once you've applied one of these, you can overlay textures like cracked paint or dotted grunge, and then surround the image with a choice of ten frames. It's a nice little tip of the hat to instantly interesting images, but I actually think that Corel does a better job of this in Paintshop Pro X6, which adds customization to the filters.
Pet eye correction. I'm so glad to see the pet eye correction tool make it back into a widely used photo app. I last saw it in the long lost Picnik online photo editor (which humorously asked whether the subject had skin or fur). In Photoshop Element's red-eye correction tool, there's now a little Pet Eye check box. As with red eye correction, you just click a crosshairs in the center of the pupil, and voilà, your dog looks canine again!
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