Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 review

Photoshop Elements offers a surprisingly large number of its big brother's professional features and a few of its own.

In this latest version, the user interface gets the 'reversed out' look popularised by high-end applications such as Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom, with white text on a grey background.

You can work either in Full Edit mode or Quick Fix, which replaces the usual palettes with simplified correction tools such as Red Eye, Lighten Shadows and Sharpen. In Full Edit mode, the Styles and Effects palette has been renamed Artwork and Effects, and gains five tabs to switch between functions ranging from backgrounds to text effects. Frame Layers support a range of new edge effects, one of several additions aimed at digital scrapbooking: arranging photos into creative layouts.

This is also reflected in major changes to the Photo Creations feature. Instead of stepping through a wizard to create a greetings card, album page or CD cover, you now choose a Template, which governs the basic layout, and a Theme, which controls the cosmetics such as colour and edge effects. The graphics are beautifully designed, and your selected Photo Creation appears as a normal image file that you can customise by dropping photos into the frames, switching the Theme or using any of Photoshop Elements' usual tools. You can also create slideshows, exported as video or PDF files, and produce attractive Flash-based web galleries.

Photoshop Elements offers plenty of professional adjustment features, but previously lacked tone curves, a classic tool for massaging light and shade. This is now partly redressed by Adjust Color Curves, which presents the same function using Adobe's 'variations' system, where you choose between several possible adjustments by eye. Other new editing features include Convert to Black and White, which helps you get the best results when converting colour photos to monochrome, and Correct Camera Distortion, which provides several lens correction tools in one place, enabling you to fix bent scenes with the minimum of fuss.

Elements' Organizer module offers all the tagging, keywording, categorising and searching options you could wish for, plus the clever idea of 'stacks'. When you've taken several snaps of the same scene, it's annoying to wade through them all as you browse your photo collection. Using stacks, you can group them so that only your favourite one is shown. The Organizer can form stacks automatically, based on time taken and visual similarity, and when you edit a photo, a special stack called a Version Set can group the original with your retouched version(s).

This is a stonking upgrade to an excellent package, and superb value, except perhaps if you're upgrading from version 4, in which case you will save only about a tenner.