Four new features fire up latest Photoshop Elements

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.