Originally published Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 12:08 AM
Comments (0)
E-mail article
Print view
Share
Four new features fire up latest Photoshop Elements
Four new ways to manipulate, store and retrieve your digital photos make Adobe's Photoshop Elements 8 a worthy new version.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
A successful product is rarely finished. Over the course of its lifetime, new versions are released that offer new features and abilities.
I'm not talking about "updates," which are typically free to registered users, deal with minor bug fixes and have a decimal point followed by a tenths or hundredths place number. Product "upgrades" are major revisions to the product. You either have to buy it again or pay some kind of upgrade fee if you can show you own the most current version.
Adobe just came out with Photoshop Elements 8, an upgrade to its consumer photo-manipulative application and while it's got all sorts of new features, four of them are really impressive.
One: Recompose
The first one has to do with cropping or resizing a photo so as to make it fit into something like a smaller picture frame. The problem with cropping is that it works around the image's perimeter. The more you crop, the more you lose from the four edges. If you try and keep all of the picture as you resize, you will distort the image.
Depending on the subject matter, you can sometimes get away with a little distortion but not much. Photoshop Elements 8 introduces Recompose that lets you resize without distorting the key parts of the image such as people or buildings.
The Recompose tool actually looks at the image and determines what is important in the image. For example, let's say the picture is of three people running together in a grassy field. Two of them on the left are close together but there is some distance between those two and the third person to the right of them. Recompose recognizes that gap and as you begin to resize the image down from right to left, that distance between them gets smaller, eventually placing all three of the people more closely together.
Now you have a distortion-free, smaller picture that's been cropped from the inside rather than from its perimeter. It's really an amazing process to watch and it happens in real time as you drag the edges back and forth.
Of course, nothing like this can be 100 percent all the time, so the Recompose tool has additional features that let you control the specific internal areas you want to crop as you resize.
Two: Photomerge Exposure
Photomerge Exposure lets you deal with lighting problems in a whole new way. Let's say you take a flash picture of people close to you. They come out great but the scene behind them is way too dark.
So what you do is take another picture of the background without the flash so that it's properly lighted. Photomerge Exposure will then take those two images and combine them so that you wind up with one photo with everything properly lighted.
![]()
Three: Auto-Analyzer
Photoshop Elements 8 for the first time introduces two new features that really have nothing to do with photo manipulation. They deal with how you organize and locate the images that you've already taken.
Auto-Analyzer automatically tags your pictures. It identifies the photos that are most in focus and offer the highest contrast. It will also automatically identify which photos contain human faces. From there, it will break those down into subcategories of large groups, small groups, close ups, two faces and one face.
Four: People Recognition
Finally, People Recognition will actually learn whose face is whose. For example, when it sees a photo of your face, you tell it your name. People Recognition will continue to find more pictures that it thinks may be you to confirm or deny.
After a few times, People Recognition will actually learn your face and it will automatically categorize any new pictures of you. You can do this with as many people as you like. So the next time you wish to search for photos of anyone in your photo library, just ask People Recognition to find them for you by their name.
Photoshop Elements 8 is available in versions for Windows and Macintosh and is now available for $99.99.
E-mail article
Print view
Share
Cool yule buzz on the latest in gift gear for your nerd
Elements 8 is a snap for photographers of all skill levels
PNW Magazine | Easy As Pie
A little friendly competition between professional pie-baker Kate McDermott and The Seatttle Times' Kathleen Triesch Saul is handled with great taste.

Entertainment | Top Video | World | Offbeat Video | Sci-Tech
general classifieds
Garage & estate salesFurniture & home furnishings
Sporting goods
just listed
Fabulous 139 pieces Fukagawa Arita #917 China - $475
Moyea SWF to iPod converter - $39
NO CONTRACT, NO DEPOSIT,NO CREDIT CHECK CELL PHONE - $59
More listings
POST A FREE LISTING
shopping
events for Tuesday, Nov. 24
- Black Friday Sale at Michael Cepress Studio a...
- Lizzie's Faves Sale at Lizzie Parker Designs
- Capers November Sale
- Cicada Bridal Party Dress Sale
editors' picks
- Phinney Ridge & Greenwood shopping
- Vintage, consignment and used clothing
- Independent bookstores
- Neighborhood shopping
- Illegal workers quietly let go
- Sprouts, raw fish on attorney's 'do not eat' list
- Jerry Brewer | Jerry Brewer: Seahawks can't lean on the Hutch Crutch now
- Woman stabbed by stranger in North Seattle
- Tattoos at Mill Creek church pierce skin, soul
- UW, WSU once again meet to see who's worse
- Food-safety lawyer's wish: Put me out of business
- Husky Football Blog | Ranking the Pac
- Vikings easily beat the Seahawks
- Tugboat sinks at Seattle waterfront pier
- Illegal workers quietly let go
406 - Climate change speeds up since 1997 Kyoto accord
215 - Metro won't cut bus service after all
160 - New Husky recruit: Enes Kanter
106 - Bellevue residents blast new bikini espresso stand
94 - Middleton says Huskies "plan on scoring at least 50 points'' Saturday
86 - Tattoos at Mill Creek Church pierce skin, soul
85 - Seattle woman charged with knife attack on boyfriend's ex
76 - Jerry Brewer: Seahawks can't lean on the Hutch Crutch now
75 - Senate Democrats split on health bill's fate
58
- Sprouts, raw fish on attorney's 'do not eat' list
- Tattoos at Mill Creek church pierce skin, soul
- Food-safety lawyer's wish: Put me out of business
- Illegal workers quietly let go
- Architects, chefs find 'kid' within to build Gingerbread Village
- Rediscovering Moab, 'the most beautiful place on Earth'
- It's possible to recover a life lost to hoarding
- Child-support error costs nearly $21,000
- 'The Road' takes Viggo Mortensen to Mount St. Helens and Astoria, Ore.
- Hutch gets $10M from Bezos family for immunotherapy research




