Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 review

Each time Adobe releases a new version of Photoshop Elements, there's an expectation that it will set a new benchmark for consumer photo-editing software. The last couple of releases have brought scant improvements, but a brief look through the list of new features in version 9 is all it takes to realise that this is a significant upgrade.

For anyone that hasn't used Photoshop Elements, it's worth pointing out that it's still essentially the baby brother of Photoshop, and has many of its powerful editing features, but is far easier to use. Of course, it's aimed at enthusiasts rather than casual users: the latter are more than adequately catered for by the likes of Google Picassa.

The enthusiasts, however will shout hallelujah at the news that Adobe has finally given in and included Photoshop's Layer Masks in this release, based on user demand. This means it's possible to perform non-destructive edits (where you leave a layer's content intact and can come back later and undo any changes you made) and make better colour changes and selections.

Layer masking was one of the traditional differentiators between the baby and full versions of Photoshop, so it's surprising that both this and CS5's Content-aware Fill have made it to Elements 9. Content-aware fill can be thought of as an extension of version 8's Recompose feature, and forms part of the Spot Healing Brush tool. You paint an area of a photo that you want to remove, and the tool intelligently fills the space with a background. This could be a brick wall, a portion of lawn, or just about anything. It isn't perfect - the footballers below illustrate the problems that can occur - but it's impressive given how quickly and generally well it works.

Content-aware fill has also been added to the Photomerge Panorama tool, which means that you no longer have to crop the final image to get rid of the hatched areas at the edges. Again, this is a real boon as it works so well.