(Credit:
Alien Skin)
Whether it's rescuing a photo mucked up by a camera's image processing or boosting interest in an otherwise stale photo, Alien Skin's Snap Art 2 plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements aims to let users quickly turn mouse clicks into brush strokes.
The software announced and made available Monday gives users 10 natural media, hundreds of styles (oil paint, watercolor, pencil , pastels, etc.), and several canvas textures. The example above was done using the Impasto selection, giving it the look of thick paint, which would be great for hiding photo flaws. There are more than 700 presets that can be tweaked, and this version allows for greater control over detail retention than the last did.
Plus, this update leverages computers with multicore processors as well as multiprocessor systems, cutting down on rendering times and making work on larger prints possible.
The plug-in is available now for $199 or a $99 upgrade for users of the first version. (The upgrade is free if you bought version 1 after the end of March 2009.)
Lastly, I'm in the process of writing reviews for the latest versions of Alien Skin's plug-ins, including Snap Art 2. Look for them soon here on Crave.
With the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements, Adobe's laying on the Web subscription message really thick. Take, for instance, the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one of the applications. The standard Organize, Edit, Create, and Share options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared with the large, rotating slide show heralding the many benefits of the free and $49.99 Plus memberships for Photoshop.com (more project templates, remote backup, and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might as well have sold the space as an ad; it's that annoying. (For more on the online and mobile aspects of the Elements release, read our coverage on Download.com.) And that's too bad, because Photoshop Elements remains a very nice midrange photo editor, but all of these bells and whistles--some pretty off-key--increasingly detract from its core strengths.
Click here for a tour of Photoshop Elements 7's features
The program's main advantage is that it's cheaper than Photoshop and Lightroom, but remains powerful enough for most photo retouching tasks. Thus, the improved raw workflow is quite welcome--improved, in that you can bypass it entirely if you want. For example, to create a slide show of NEF (Nikon raw) files, it simply applies the default raw-processing settings and treats them like JPEGs.
Also quite useful is the new text search box in the organizer, which is a fast, easy way to filter by keywords or basic metadata. Very basic metadata; you can only search on time, data, camera, and caption text. But that should be sufficient for this class of user.
... Read more
Photoshop Elements 6 is a good tool for those addicted to Adobe. It streamlines Photoshop's toolset for photograph editing and organizing, but like its antecedent, it's got some unwieldy bulk and it could be simplified even further. Is it worth upgrading?
... Read more
Update: Contrary to what Adobe initially said, Premiere Elements doesn't support HD DVD output after all. Sorry for the confusion.
Adobe Systems updated its hobbyist-oriented Elements family on Monday, grafting in some new DNA from Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom into Photoshop Elements 6 and giving Premiere Elements 4 a direct connection to YouTube.
Adobe Photoshop Elements lets multiple photos be combined into one to get around problems such as subjects caught mid-blink.
(Credit: Adobe)Both the Elements family members, which cost $99 individually or $149 together, sport a new dark interface that resembles Lightroom, Apple Aperture and several other applications that set off images and videos more smartly than the usual Windows software. Less superficially, they also get Lightroom's tabbed interface designed to walk users through tasks in a sensible progression.
From Photoshop CS3, the little-brother Elements gets Photomerge and a new Quick Selection Tool. The first of these fancier features lets users join the best parts of multiple photos, such as those with faces of subjects who aren't blinking or grimacing, and create better panoramas. The second is for more sophisticated selection of complicated areas, for example junior minus a distracting background you don't want in the birthday card photo.
Another Photoshop Elements feature is smart albums, which directs the software to create dynamically updated groups of photos based on user-specified attributes such as whether they've been edited, when they were shot or what camera was used. The software also is faster than version 5 when it comes to importing, searching and tagging photos.
Premiere Elements always could be used to produce video files and DVDs, but some new output options are in version 4. For those who like the latest in rotating optical media, Premiere Elements has high-def support for Blu-ray Disc. It's also got a three-channel audio mixer for more elaborate sound control.
And for those who want to skip straight to the virtual realm, a module lets users upload videos directly to YouTube in its native Flash video format, complete with tags.
Photoshop Elements doesn't have any equivalent, though, for photo-sharing sites such as Flickr.
The two components of Elements also are designed to work better together, sharing tags, ratings, styles and a file-browser interface called Organizer, Adobe said.
Both packages are available for Windows users now; a Mac version of Photoshop Elements is planned for early 2008. Though Adobe un-canceled its Mac OS X version of full-fledged Premiere, there's no Mac version of Premiere Elements.
- prev
- 1
- next
