Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

What's New in Elements 8

Elements 8 brings some really cool new editing features, as well as some helpful new organizing tools:

• Recompose your photos (Recomposing Photos). You know how it is: You try and try to get a photo of all the kids together, but in the best one, there's an awkward gap between your son and daughter because they just wouldn't stand close together. Or you got a perfect shot of that mountain landscape, except for that pesky condo in the background. Wouldn't it be great if you could squeeze the edges of your photo together and get rid of the empty space or those unwanted objects? With the new Recompose tool you can. A couple of scribbles to tell Elements what to lose and what to keep, drag the edge of your picture, and presto!—a recomposed photo with no distortion. It's an awesome use of computer intelligence.

• Exposure Merge (Blending Exposures). Combine two or more different exposures of the same scene for one image that's well-exposed everywhere. This is similar to what you can do with the popular HDR (High Dynamic Range) tools found in Photoshop or from companies like Photomatix, only with Elements' classic ease of use. It's perfect for situations like night portraits, where properly exposing your subject can wash out the dramatic lighting of the skyline behind him.

• New look (Panels, Bins, and Tabs). Now you can view your images in the Editor as floating windows, as in previous versions of Elements, or as fixed tabs. You can arrange the Editor workspace to suit you, and you have far more options for doing so than you ever did before in Elements. What's more, you can quickly change it all if you decide you want a different setup for your current task.

• Face recognition (People Recognition). The Elements Organizer (the database where you keep track of your photos and organize them) has been able to search for human faces for some time now, but in Elements 8, it can recognize a face as Aunt Millie or Cousin Jobert and offer to tag it with the correct name.

• Guides (Straighten Tool). This has been one of the most-requested features missing from Elements: nonprinting guidelines you can position in your file to help you arrange any text or objects you're adding. They're finally here in Elements 8—a real boon for scrapbookers and other project makers.

• Quick Fix previews (Using presets). If you're using the easy Quick Fix window in the Elements Editor, you can see thumbnail previews of different settings for the tool you're using. Click one of the thumbnails or drag back and forth on it with your cursor to see its effect on your image and to adjust its intensity.

• Adjustments panel (Adjustment layers). Experienced Elements folks will really appreciate the new Adjustments panel, which lets you see the settings for any of your Adjustment layers just by clicking the layer.

• Sync your photos (Backing Up Your Files). In Elements 7, you could sync your photos to an online backup at Photoshop.com (Adobe's online sharing service), but in Elements 8 you can also sync photos between two computers running Elements by means of Photoshop.com, so both computers always have the same photos available to them. (This feature is U.S.-only, for now.)

• Better integration between the Organizer and Premiere Elements (The Media Browser). If you use both Photoshop Elements and Adobe's video-editing program Premiere Elements, you'll appreciate the increased number of options for sending film clips over to Premiere Elements and for analyzing your movies in the Elements 8 Organizer.

  Note

  One of the side effects of this better integration is that you'll see a lot of items pertaining to video editing in the Organizer's menus, even if you don't have Premiere Elements. You can turn most of these off if you don't care to see them. The Media Browser tells you how. (Appendix A explains all the Organizer's menus.)

• Tagging improvements (Creating Categories and Tags). The Organizer's Keyword Tag pane (where you assign keywords to your photos) has a handy new text box where you can just type in the name for a new tag, click Apply, and add that tag to all your selected photos. There's also a "cloud" view of your tags, like the keyword clouds you may have seen on websites.

• Full Screen view (Full Screen view). Adobe has gussied up the Organizer's Full Screen view so you can edit and tag your photos while looking at them at full screen. You can even watch them as a slideshow, complete with music (Full Screen View).

• Activation (Scratch Disks). You may not love this new feature, but Adobe only lets you use your copy of Elements 8 on two computers, so it's important to deactivate Elements on your old computer before installing it on a new one. Scratch Disks explains how.

If you've used Elements before and you're not sure which version you've got, a quick way to tell is to look for the version number on the CD. If the program is already installed, see The Welcome Screen for help figuring out which version you have.

Incidentally, all eight versions of Elements are totally separate programs, so you can run all of them on the same computer if you like, as long as your operating system is compatible. (Adobe doesn't recommend trying to have more than one version open at a time, though.) So if you prefer the older version of a particular tool, then you can still use it. If you've been using one of the earlier versions, then you'll feel right at home in Elements 8. You'll just find that it's easier than ever to get stuff done with the program.