Product Description

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 software for Macintosh combines power and simplicity to help you do it all. Edit and enhance your photos by fixing common flaws instantly or using advanced options for more control—you can even fine-tune the raw files produced by your digital camera. Keep every photo at your fingertips with intuitive search and viewing options. And show off your creativity to family and friends in entertaining ways, including cards, calendars, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2279 in Software
• Brand: Adobe
• Model: 19230169
• Released on: 2006-03-03
• Platform: Mac OS X
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .50 pounds

Features

• Make your photos look their best by fixing common flaws with a click and editing with less fuss, perfecting your photos with advanced options, and have fun with artistic special effects.
• Show off your creativity and share your photos in entertaining and creative ways.
• Easily find and view your photos and keep your photos at your fingertips with powerful search options.
• Enjoy nondestructive photo processing and fine-tune exposure and lighting by working directly with the raw image files from your digital camera.
• Do it all with one product and edit, enhance, and show your digital photos with one powerful yet easy to use product.

Amazon.com
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 software combines innovation and simplicity to help you work with and enhance your digital photos with some of the industry's most powerful tools. With Elements 4.0, you can fix common flaws instantly, or show off your creativity in a wide variety of entertaining ways by using your photos to create cards, calendars, and much more.

Easily access your photos and add, delete, or move folders using the Folder View. Even create folders to hold collections.

Adjust skin tones for a more natural look, even in poorly lit photos.

Easily select by brushing over any element of your photo to make a range of adjustments to a specific area or object.

Make Quicker Fixes Than Ever Before
For starters, Elements 4.0 offers users more precise controls that allow you to adjust specific areas of a photo in less time and even remove red eye automatically. The software's Quick Fix mode lets you perform a full range of common photo adjustments, including color, contrast, and lighting, and skin tones can be easily adjusted for a more natural look, even in poorly lit photos. You can even compare "before" and "after" views that instantly let you see the effects of your adjustments.

Perform a full range of common photo adjustments -- such as color, contrast, and lighting -- in the convenient Quick Fix mode.

Easily upload your photos to a personal online album that can be updated with new photos at any time. Family and friends can view your photos and instantly order prints.

Turn your digital pictures into professional-quality Kodak prints, or create a memorable hardbound photo book. Both are delivered directly to your door.

When it comes time to retouching your photos, no problem. Elements 4.0 lets you easily brush over any element of your photo to make a range of adjustments to a specific area or object. For instance, you can use the Magic Selection Brush and Magic Extractor tool to isolate objects from backgrounds quickly and easily, even in complex, textured areas. You can also remove entire backgrounds, leaving foregrounds untouched, or place your friends on the top of Mount Everest or in front of the Taj Majal as if they were really there. The Spot Healing Brush lets you instantly brush away wrinkles and other unwanted objects. For more fine tuning of exposure and lighting, you can work directly with the raw image file from your camera by converting the raw files to the universal Digital Negative (DNG) format to help ensure you'll always be able to open and use your photo files in the future.

Effortless Color Corrections and Photo Management
Once you have touched up your photos, you can compare a range of color variations side by side with your original photo and select the best choice with a single click. To get the best overall color possible with your photos, Elements 4.0 offers easy slider controls for color temperature and tint. To rescue poorly lit shots, you can easily adjust shadows and highlights, lighten the shadows and reduce the glare of highlights. And with 16-bit support, you'll get smoother and more precise color results than ever before.

Do you already have hundreds of photos in your computer that you are ready to work with? Elements 4.0 offers extensive photo management capabilities that will make managing and editing your digital files a cinch. For instance, Elements 4.0 lets you type titles and labels right onto your photos and edit them at any time. An enhanced font menu and easy-to-use interface gives you the option of quickly choosing from a wide option of fonts. If you're working with multiple photos, you can save hours of effort through the software's automatic batch processes. With this time-saving feature, you can remove red eye, rename, resize, convert formats, adjust levels, add text, and more in a single step. You can also save time by scanning several photos at once. Elements 4.0 will automatically divide, straighten, and save each photo separately.

And when it's time to final the exact photo you need, Elements 4.0 includes several management features that will make your life much easier. Easily access your photos and add, delete, or move folders using the Folder View. You can even create folders to hold entire collections and organize by filename, date, file type, and many other properties. Flip through photos in a full-screen slide show and rate your favorites, apply color labels, rotate photos, change display size, and show captions. With expanded metadata search parameters, you can quickly find and preview any photo in a matter of seconds. These enhanced search options let you search from a wide range of metadata options, such as f-stop, digital camera model, and even exposure values. You can also use keywords to pinpoint your search. Looking for a photo of just Jack, but not Jack and Jill? Elements 4.0 will find it for you.

Printing and Uploading Features
When you're ready to share your photos, Elements 4.0 will help you to create a personal online album that can be updated with new photos at any time so that family and friends can view your photos and instantly order prints. You also have the option of uploading your photos to order professional-quality Kodak prints, or use Adobe Photoshop Services to create your own calendars, greeting cards, or beautiful hardbound photo books that can also be delivered directly to your doorstep. (Services may vary depending on region.) And if you just want to print your photos on your own, Elements 4.0 lets you quickly drop your photos into Picture Packages that let you print photos from your desktop printer in a variety of flexible layouts.

Customer Reviews

Improved, But Beware!
I've had it for a couple of days now, but there are a number of things about PE4 that make the transition from version 3 to 4 needlessly difficult, not to mention if you get PE4 first.

The main change involves the use of "Bridge" to handle what the Browser function did previously. Unfortunately, it seems there are some missing planks in their Bridge, as it's like having 2 separate programs attempt to talk to hand off files to each other. It is clunky, not intuitive at all, and often doesn't work in a consistent way, even when you figure it out.

According to Adobe Technical Help [when you can reach them through 3 or 4 layers of sales beforehand], there is no "Organizer" for Mac that comes with the Windows version, and they were surprised at a number of missing elements in this version as a result. It also seems that they've tried to piggyback an existing full Photoshop program--Bridge--onto the back of Elements, which despite appearances, is a completely different program.

Another example: the Adjust Shadows/Highlights--which allows you to correct for things in shadows, or too bright...buried in a 3rd level menu...has been changed from the PE3 default of "50% lighten" to a "25% lighten" with no ability to change that preset. So everytime you want to adjust your picture, you have to push the slider back to 0% and start out there to see what's best for your photo. Clearly Adobe recognized their 50% preset was too much for most, and changed it--but left off the ability of the user to preset what works best for us. What's the solution to this or any other inflexible/confusing issue? I was told several times that if I wanted things to work better, I should buy the full Photoshop.

That is simply unacceptable, especially for a company of Adobe's size and history of working primarily on the Mac platform. I would rather have fewer features that work more reliably and straightforward, especially involving putting our most used features on a toolbar instead of being forced to grab them out of deep menus everytime.

In Bridge, they are trying to combine a number of features found in iPhoto, such as rating photos by stars, making it more flexible. However, they don't allow you to customize your displays or views enough to be efficient, much less easy to deal with. The speed of Bridge, and especially interacting with 4, is slow. Also particularly irksome is the lack of sensitivity/responsiveness of the sliders within PE4, i.e. brush size and opacity.

So far, I'm not impressed with the Magic Selection Tool, one of the main reasons I wanted to upgrade. It doesn't seem to grab things as efficiently as advertised, although it is better than just the Magic Wand 3 had. I'm also less than impressed with another new feature: Adjust Skin Tone, something that could be a big time saver while offering the improvements most people care about.

The combined Help program is overly detailed in some regards, yet leaves out big chunks of the program for you to guess at solutions. They have virtually no tutorials or overviews of the program specifically for the Mac version.

I will update this review as I use it more, but I would caution against jumping at this upgrade until they work out more of the kinks in the interface, unless you are a virtual pro and don't mind spending a lot of time figuring things out that aren't quite Ready For Primetime yet. What I look to PE for is something that allows more extensive editing than iPhoto6 has, and yet doesn't have the complexity or cost of the graphics standard Photoshop.

Whether because of the Mac platform changing to Intel chips, or friction between the companies, it seems Adobe is heading in the wrong direction on the Mac platform, making us seem once again like the red-haired stepchild in the computer world, while still charging the same as the Windows versions.

Nice results but lousy user experience
I'm always reluctant to upgrade any Adobe products and the upgrades from Elements 2 to 3 to 4 have been no different. I upgraded to 4 simply because 3 would not run when we switched to Tiger on our Quicksilver. 3 would run fine on two Powerbooks with the same flavor of Tiger, but not on the Quicksilver (???).

For the amateur, Elements is an excellent, if not superb, photo editor. For maintaining web sites, its very strong with the right set of tools for batch processing. While the tools are not as extensive as competing products, Elements just burns right through the job much faster than any other program I've used.

The user experience is the problem and, in my belief, a big one. It looks like garbage on the screen, right out of Windows. Tiny icons, disorganized, completely different windows handling (close, hide, etc) than any other Mac app and dreadfully lousy as a result. Error messages that make no sense are the norm (just repeat what you tried to do in the first place and it will likely work).

I use Elements for a very restricted set of requirements: some editing, reordering in the browser and batch renaming. For every day use, I don't go near it. Graphic Converter. Cheaper, easier to use, Mac interface, bullet proof code and lively response as opposed to Elements taking forever to open and balks at the slighest provocation. And, Elements can and does crash or is Force Quitted at times.

Quite frankly, understand your criteria. I've been using Elements 2, 3 and now 4 for about 5 years now and believe iPhoto or any of the software that comes with digital cameras is better for casual use and GraphicConverter for more demanding use.

Not usable for Mac OX 10.4.8
I was disappointed when I discovered that I could not use Elements version 4.0 on my new Mac 10.4.8. I had to return it and got credit for it. Photoshop Elements does not seem to compatible with Intel duo core processors in these new Macs. Apparently Adobe has not made it usable yet for this new Mac. When I ordered it, I read that it worked for 10.4, which was not the whole truth.
Dorothy Bausch