Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 review

Photoshop Elements is an outstanding product, offering a sublime mixture of powerful editing tools, photo-management functions and home-oriented projects.

However, recent updates have brought scant improvements, leaving the software to coast its way to success rather than extend its lead over its rivals.

Version 8 isn't much different, although it has a few useful additions. The Recompose feature, for example, lets you change the shape of photos without cropping the edges or distorting pre-defined key areas. Instead, it squeezes or stretches background areas of the photo. It's extremely useful for fitting images to websites, photo frames or Windows desktops. However, it's disappointing that the borders of the image file aren't adjusted automatically - this must be done manually to fit the new picture shape. This feature is executed better in Xara Xtreme 5 (see What's New, Shopper 260).

PhotoMerge is a group of functions that combine multiple photos. These include panorama stitching and a tool that combines the best smiles from a series of group portraits. The latest addition is PhotoMerge Exposure, which combines photos taken at different exposures to produce a single photo in which everything is well exposed. This high dynamic range (HDR) photography is ideal in situations where a scene contains a range of bright and dark areas that are impossible to resolve in a single exposure. It's nothing new, though, as HDR has been part of Corel's Paint Shop Pro for nearly two years (see What's New, Shopper 242). Alternatively, you could buy a dedicated program such as HDRsoft Photomatix Pro 3.1.

PhotoMerge Exposure worked best when the subject was static, the camera was tripod-mounted and the range of exposures wasn't too wide. Moving subjects or handheld camerawork proved too much for the automatic mode. In the manual mode, we had to align the photos ourselves and select which parts of which photos to stitch together. Manual alignment was simple but area selection proved clumsy, and there were often visible seams in the combined photos.

Our favourite new feature is also one of the simplest. An Arrange button next to the Help menu makes it easy to tile multiple images and set the same viewpoint and zoom level on them all instantly - very useful for finding the best shot in a series of exposures. You can also switch instantly between fitting them all onscreen and showing them at 100 per cent magnification. Frustratingly, clicking an image's title bar no longer provides a short cut to the Resize and Duplicate functions.

Organizer is Elements' bundled media manager, and it has just as many new features as the main application. A new full-screen mode includes one-click colour fixes for photos, plus animated slideshows. There's also streamlined keyword tagging for photos, so you can add tags simply by clicking on a list of recently entered options. Organizer now recognises faces to simplify the task of adding name tags to photos. It offers a few faces for naming and, after a while, makes educated guesses about faces it has already seen. Rather than asking 'Who is this?', questions such as 'Is this Ben?' begin to appear. More often than not, it was correct, but it also mistook a lot of armpits, earlobes and inanimate objects for faces, and rejecting these became quite tedious. Meanwhile, it missed many faces, and the system for adding them manually was hopelessly cumbersome. Google's free Picasa software has recently added automatic face tagging, and does a far better job of it.