Everyone who has read EM for any length of time knows that I’m a fan of Adobe. I generally love working Premiere but never had much use for Flash or Photoshop. Not because I think they are bad products, but because they are overly complicated for my simple needs. I actually use Premiere to create a lot of composite video and animation instead of Flash. So a few years ago Adobe heard my complaints and created a simpler version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements and they even have a simpler version of Premiere called Premiere Elements. You can purchase each of these separately for $99 or get a both for $149. Recently I discovered that since I stopped working with Video and switched to photos my life has been a lot easier. But I’m a terrible Photographer and need some post production help. That’s where Photoshop Elements come in.
At first glance this looks like a sexier version of the industry standard Photoshop. Adobe really needs to hire some UI folks if they want to go after the casual crowd with Elements. The Organizer isn’t as user friendly as I would have liked it to be. Once it’s set up, it works perfectly fine, but on first blush it’s pretty intimidating because it doesn’t do a good job of just finding your photos and you know, organizing them. No, it opens a screen that lists all the folders on you hard drive, but it doesn’t import anything or even prompt you to import your photos – there’s probably a way to do this, but since it didn’t do it by default I lost interest for awhile. I downloaded Google’s Picassa tool last week and was up and running in a few minutes. It automatically searched my entire drive, imported my photos and organized them by directory. Photoshop Elements didn’t do that and it’s disappointing. I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out the interface and gave up for awhile. I just wasn’t in the mood to play with "complex" software. If I’m not up and running in less than 10 minutes, I have very little interest in using it. But since I did want to review this, I stuck with it. I eventually realized that, duh, all you have to do is drag your photos over to the organizer and then it’ll do the rest. It doesn’t automatically sort your images (again, I’m sure this feature is buried somewhere in the options tab). You have to tag them, then you can go and look at images by tags/keywords. Unsorted you get something like the image below.
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