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Adobe Photoshop Elements 4
December 9, 2005 
Because many of us cannot afford the $600 Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe has very kindly made a less-expensive version of Adobe Photoshop, called Elements 4. At under $100, Elements 4 packs quite a punch for home users who just want to do simple things with their digital pictures. The newest version, Elements 4, offers a whole set a new tools to the program. Adobe Photoshop Elements just might be the best home user photo editor out there. A scaled-down down application, like Elements is from Photoshop CS2, is usually pretty lacking and cheap feeling, but with Elements 4, you don't get that feeling at all. It combines the best of Photoshop CS2's photo editing tools with the much needed simplicity for non-photography experts. We actually like using Elements 4 over Photoshop CS2 for photo fixes, but for things like color correction and/or major editing, we prefer to use Photoshop CS2. Using Elements 4 is very easy for anyone due to Adobe's very well thought out layout, navigation and help features. Image tools are located on the left side in a convenient toolbar that is very similar to Photoshop CS2. This toolbar puts all of Element's tools no further than a click away. Some new additions to Elements 4 from previous versions is the ability to add panning and zoom effects (often called Ken Burns) to slide shows, which was absent from Elements 3. This very easy-to-use feature produces powerful results in letting you create multipart "camera moves" across your images. A nice new Quick Reorder window no longer requires you to scroll through the horizontal timeline to rearrange your slides. Windows Media video movies can now also be added Two new features added to Element's photo sorter, Organizer, allow you to automatically remove red-eye on all of your photos with one click. The new face-tagging command is also much more reliable in Elements 4. Organizer can now find human faces within your photos—not specific people's faces, but faces in general. The results are in turn displayed in an isolated window to allow you to tag them with keywords. Now this face-tagging sounds great on paper, but it can get a little hard using it with large photo collections. Perhaps the biggest addition to Elements 4 is new selection technology for the Magic Selection Brush. You can now just draw/paint a red overlay over the area of the image that you want to select, but what is cool is that you don't have to follow an image's contour or edges because Elements 4 will automatically tell from your rough selection what you want to select. This works perfectly on something you want to select that is on a one color background, but if you are trying The new Adjust Color for Skin Tone feature in Elements 4 is a much more solid addition. You can correct the color of what is probably the most important part of an image with people, the skin, Overall, Adobe Elements 4 is excellent for the casual home photographer that just wants an easy and quick way to touch-up and correct aspects of a photo. If you're more than just a novice or casual user, you'll probably want something a little more powerful, like Adobe Photoshop CS2 if  Pros: Easy to use, lots of options and tools, improved photo organization tools, greatly improved slide show features, skin color correction
Cons: Magic Selection Tool doesn't work with complex images, mediocre red-eye tool Editors' Rating:   Shop for Adobe Photoshop Elements 4
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