Topic: Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements 9

[Simon]

New professional-grade editing tools and improved hand-holding for beginners make this a superb all-rounder for amateur photographers.

With rivals such as Google churning out the perfectly respectable Picasa for free, Adobe has to work hard to convince consumers to part with nigh-on £80 inc VAT for Photoshop Elements. Borrowing flagship features from the £650 Photoshop CS5 suite is a pretty bold means of persuasion.

Content-aware fill was the standout new feature in this year’s CS5 refresh, so it comes as a welcome shock to find it in Elements so soon, albeit in a less powerful form. For those unfamiliar with content-aware fill, it’s a means of removing unwanted objects from photos, with Photoshop analysing the surrounding area and filling the gap.

In Photoshop Elements, content-aware fill is added to the healing brush. That means you can’t draw neat selections around errant objects as you can in CS5, but instead have to dab away at interlopers or that portrait-ruining tree branch, which is a good deal less precise. Nevertheless, the results are often stunning. Random skiiers ruining a group shot on the slopes and fingers obscuring faces in portraits were among the objects near seamlessly removed in our tests.

Read more: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/361363/adobe-photoshop-elements-9

[sam]

but still so expensive. Gimp = free.

[Rik]

Adobe = great.

[Simon]

I think I've still got version 6.