Elements 8 is a snap for photographers of all skill levels

Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac manages to do something that's difficult to find in software: It caters as well to beginners as it does to advanced photographers.

Typically, software hits the high or low end of the scale. Apple's iPhoto, for example, is a great tool for organizing your photos and making prints or photo books. However, its image-editing features are very much geared toward making it easy for anyone to apply color adjustments or make minor fixes.

The next jump up is to a professional application like Apple's Aperture, Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom or the image-editing gorilla itself, Photoshop CS4.

A lot of photographers fall somewhere in the middle, with more folks headed toward the "enthusiastic amateur" level, if the number of people I see carrying digital SLR cameras is any indication. They don't mind putting more time into getting good shots, but they probably don't want the complexity or expense of the top-tier software.

Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac covers that entire middle ground. But what I like most is that Adobe hasn't created just an image editor: Photoshop Elements addresses many situations specific to photographers — and all for $80.

Basics and more: If you're interested only in getting digital photos from your camera to your Mac, with some minor adjustments, iPhoto is a great tool already on your computer.

It's in that just-beyond-basics gray area where Photoshop Elements 8 begins to shine. The Quick Edit mode, which provides sliders to adjust common aspects like lighting and color, includes a new grid icon to the left of each slider. Click it to view nine variations of the slider's setting so you can preview the effects; you can also click and drag within one of the preview icons to make finer adjustments.

More helpful for casual photographers is the Guided Edit mode. Although not new to version 8, this mode walks you through basic adjustments and opens up new features that address common photo challenges.

For example, how many times have you taken a photo that would be great if not for the distracting person walking through the background? If you have another shot of the same scene that does not include the person, use the Photomerge Scene Cleaner feature to paint out the distraction. (Windows users received the Photomerge Scene Cleaner feature in Photoshop Elements 7 last year, but Adobe skipped that version on the Mac.)

Common situations: Suppose you've taken a shot of a few people but you want them to appear closer together. The new Recompose tool lets you specify which elements you want to keep (say, the kids) and which areas are expendable (the field behind them), and then resize your photo. Expendable areas are intelligently compressed while the people get pushed closer together.

The end result varies on the photo itself: It works best with indistinct, out-of-focus areas that compress well into digital soup.

Tackling that sort of edit manually involves more than what most casual photographers want to do. But Photoshop Elements includes most of the features and tools of Photoshop, so if you know what you're doing, the capabilities are at your fingertips.

The new Photomerge Exposure addresses an even more common photographic frustration: A person or object you're shooting is exposed well, but the background is either completely dark or blown out as white (or the opposite — background great, but subject a dark smudge). The feature combines several shots captured at different exposures to create balanced lighting throughout the image.

Again, the utility of the feature depends on your source material. You pretty much need to shoot using a tripod and a camera that can fire off several fast, bracketed shots (all at different exposure settings). Otherwise the result can easily appear blurred.

A bridge: Photoshop Elements 8 also includes a full version of Bridge CS4 for importing and organizing your photos, not a reduced feature, as was the version of Bridge CS3 that shipped with Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac. But because Bridge and Elements are separate programs, you can just as easily use iPhoto as your organizer of choice.

Those are just a few highlights of what the software offers. The point is that Photoshop Elements 8 caters to photographers of all skill levels, whether punching up snapshots or applying color adjustments to selected areas of an image.

(Disclosure: I'm the author of the book "Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide," published by Peachpit Press.)

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com.

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