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Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 is an amateur digital photographer's dream, with good organizational tools, a comprehensive, high-quality feature set, and a new, simpler interface. The only negative is that you have to bounce between two different programs to accomplish many tasks, which may confuse novices who need only the most basic image-editing and distribution features. For more advanced and ambitious users seeking the optimum blend of power and usability (but not the expert-level features of Photoshop itself), Photoshop Elements is the answer.

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Unlike most competitors, Adobe has the advantage of starting with an extraordinarily powerful program, Photoshop. The developers' challenge is to make the application useful to mere mortals, rather than the editing professionals who use it daily. I never doubted that Photoshop Elements would be powerfulΓ??the question was whether it would be usable. That appears to have been a major focus of the new version, and the results are very good.

Organize Your Photos

Like its predecessors, this version of Elements consists of two workspaces, the Organizer and Editor. You'll find lots of crossover in project creation and sharing, but at a high level the Organizer is for collecting your photos and the Editor is, as you'd expect, for modifying them. The Organizer can display thumbnail views of all images in your collection, just those in an imported batch, or all the photos in a particular folder. A calendar view shows pictures arrayed by the dates they were taken.

This version, like those before it, lets you extensively tag your images with names, dates, places and other metadata, and use these tags for searching and creating collections, though obviously tagging everything can take considerable time. One relatively uncommon feature lets you stack your photosΓ??group similar shots together and choose the best to place on the top of the stack. The capability lets you reduce clutter in your albums without deleting images that, although not your favorites, are worth keeping.

You can elect to group similar images together during import, or at any later time, and Elements will find similar images and suggest stacks, a capability that worked well when I imported photos from my Norcent DCS-760 digital camera. You can also stack images manually by selecting a number of pictures, right-clicking, and choosing Stack

File: Photoshop Elements 6.0.rar