Adobe Elements 4.0 review

The market for photo-editing software is ridiculously competitive at the moment, and numerous software companies are falling over themselves to upgrade their editing programs in time for Christmas.

However, this latest upgrade should ensure that Adobe's Photoshop Elements remains the leader of the pack.

This fairly hefty upgrade fine-tunes and improves many of the program's existing editing tools as well as adding some entirely new features. The red-eye removal tool now works automatically and can remove red-eye from pictures as you import them from your camera or hard disk. The slideshow options have also been enhanced, enabling you to add zoom and pan effects and a number of new transitions. We were also pleased to see that the program seemed noticeably faster and more responsive.

But it's the new features that we're all interested in, and these certainly don't disappoint. The list of entirely new features is relatively short, but there are some real showstoppers among them. One new feature is particularly remarkable: you can tell Photoshop Elements to sort through an entire group of photos and locate just the pictures that have people's faces in them. It then displays a close-up of each face so that you can label each photo with a tag such as 'family' or 'friends'. This makes it easy to organise your photos so that you can find pictures of specific people really quickly.

Two other features also throw down the gauntlet to Adobe's rivals. Most photo-editing programs include some sort of magic selection tool that helps you select an object with a complicated outline, so that you can cut it out from the photo and save it on its own or superimpose it on another image. However, Photoshop Elements' Magic Extractor works better than anything we've seen so far. You start by quickly drawing a rectangle or oval around the object you want to select. Another window opens showing a close-up of the selected object, and you simply mark a few points on the object with the foreground pen. This enables Elements to extract the object - lifting it away from its background - so you keep only the object and lose the surrounding background. We tried this with one particular image that we'd been having problems with and it worked first time. This sort of feature justifies the price of the upgrade all by itself.

Elements also includes a variation on this feature called the Magic Selection Brush. This allows you to select objects quickly within a photo, rather than removing them from the photo, so you can edit those objects without altering the rest of the image.

The impressive thing about these new features is not just that they work so well, but that they're also very easy to use. It's this combination of power and ease of use that gives Photoshop Elements the edge over its many rivals, and this upgrade should make sure that it retains that edge for the next year or so.