Product Description

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 software combines power and simplicity so you can do more with your photos. Instantly fix flaws or use new advanced tools for more precise control over color and lighting. Quickly put your photos into fun, flexible layouts that you can edit, rearrange, and resize. Show off your creativity by sharing photos in new lipbooks, dynamic slide shows, and web photo galleries created using Flash technology. And with your collection organized the way that works best for you, you can find any photo or video clip instantly.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1266 in Software
• Brand: Adobe
• Model: 29230477
• Released on: 2006-09-29
• Platform: Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 4.00 pounds

Features

• Keep your photos at your fingertips with powerful and flexible tags, search options, and comparison tools
• Fix photos in a snap with intelligent features that automatically correct skin tone, red eye lighting, color, and contrast
• Make good photos great with superior editing tools: fix problems with color, brightness, exposure, lens distortions and blurred edges
• Share your photos in interactive web galleries and animate your photos with a choice of themes
• Edit, enhance, organize, and share your photos with one powerful yet easy-to-use product

Amazon.com
Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 software combines power and simplicity so you can do more with your photos. This is a comprehensive software package that addresses an incredible array of tasks related to digital photography: downloading, organization, automatic editing, advanced editing, creativity templates, sharing photos, and even archiving. Photoshop Elements 5.0 is a soup-to-nuts digital photography solution based on the technology of Adobe Photoshop, the industry standard for professional-quality photo editing.

Convert any color photo into a rich black-and-white photos by selecting from an array of variation samples. View larger.

Flipbooks are a fun and creative way to display your photos. View larger.

Choose from many styles of templates and frames to form a photo collage. View larger.

Easily organize your photos and video clips with visual tagging options that let you categorize by people, places, or events. View larger.

Professional-Quality Editing Made Easy
Photoshop Elements is designed to be easy to use; you can fix photos in a snap with intelligent features that automatically correct skin tone, lighting, color, and contrast. Even see red eye removed automatically as you download photos.

More experienced users can take advantage of Photoshop Elements' advanced tools. These tools let you make adjustments to color, lighting, exposure, brightness, and contrast. The new Adjust Color Curves controls make it even easier to fine-tune color, brightness, and contrast. Other advanced innovations include the Healing Brush for removing wrinkles and unwanted objects, the Spot Healing Brush for getting rid of dust and scratches in old photos, and Shadow/Highlight for lightening shadows and reducing the glare of highlights.

Give your color originals a dramatic, elegant look by turning them into rich black-and-white photos by selecting from an array of variation samples. Easily correct camera lens distortion at photo edges and keystone effects that exaggerate perspective. Get crisper-looking photos by sharpening blurred edges, even remove blurring caused by low-light conditions.

Photoshop Elements' precise selection tools and layering abilities allow you to combine elements from different photos to create fun composites. Quickly separate an object from its background—even in complex, textured areas—and instantly remove rough edges, and then combine it with another photo to create a new scene.

With support for RAW image files and many new camera models, Photoshop Elements 5.0 you the highest-quality image-editing results.

Creativity and sharing
Photoshop Elements' creativity tools let you present your photos in creative, entertaining ways. Use flexible layout options as a starting point for your creations: choose a blank slate, basic frameworks, or professionally designed themes. Create memorable keepsakes in so many ways: Create custom slide shows, cards, album pages, CD and DVD covers, scrapbook layouts, photo books, prints, Flipbooks, and much more. Take advantage of Flash technology to share your photos in interactive web galleries and animate your photos with a choice of themes, such as a spinning carousel, to provide an interactive viewing experience.

With drag-and-drop simplicity, you can drop photos into flexible layouts, drag to resize images, and move photos anywhere on the page with ease. Customize all of the elements of your chosen layout. Adjust layout colors to better complement your photos; add new graphical elements to enhance or personalize the theme; and even use your own photos and art as backgrounds or textures on which to base new layouts.

Set off your photos with more than 100 included frames, from traditional to elegant to avant-garde.

Enjoy integrated access to online services, such as sharing photos and photo creations on the Web, and ordering prints and hardbound photo books--all from within Photoshop Elements. Easily upload your photos to CEIVA digital receivers that automatically receive and display new photos daily. Turn your photos into real U.S. postage at PhotoStamps.com (U.S. only).

Photoshop Elements 5.0 also adds the Map view, so you can find photos by the locations where they were taken. Simply drag photos to any location in the new Map view, which is tied to online satellite views. Even upload your Map view to the web, for easy sharing with friends and family.

Great Tools for Downloading, Organization, and Archiving
In addition to the powerful image-editing and creativity tools, Elements 5.0 includes great tools for downloading, organization, and archiving your photos.

The enhanced Photo Downloader grabs photos from your digital camera and mobile phone in a snap, and it also can clear the camera card for you. Organize photos more easily by automatically grouping and tagging photos as you download—based on the time they were taken or on an event. Folder names are automatically created with a matching tag so you can easily find these groups of photos later. Photoshop Elements can find multiple photos of similar shots and automatically group them together, and you can choose the best shot as the thumbnail for easy viewing.

Easily organize your photos and video clips with visual tagging options that let you categorize by people, places, or events. Then view in a variety of ways, including by tag, on a timeline, and in a calendar view. You can also quickly find and view all the previously saved versions of a photo by simply clicking to expand its Version Set in the Organizer.

Archiving tools let you back up your precious photo collection

Customer Reviews

Excellent product - highly recommended
I have purchased and used every version of Adobe Photoshop Elements since the product was first released - and most recently I upgraded to Photoshop Elements 5.O. I read another review posted here on Amazon in which the reviewer states that a lot of important features are missing from this newest version. Specifically, he says that Elements 5.0 omits two important features - selection brushes and sharpening filters. That is just not true. These features are in the new 5.0 version, so I'm not sure why the reviewer would have said that (unless he is not really familiar with this product).

In my opinion, this is the BEST editing software on the market for the money. I don't know of any other product that offers anywhere near power or flexibility for a similar price. I think the upgrade to Elements 5.0 is worth it - "color curves" are a great new feature, as are the new artwork and effects that were added to this version. These are a lot of fun and very useful particularly if you enjoy creating scrapbooks.

And yes, despite what the prior reviewer says - you CAN adjust the color curve in the Elements 5.0. You may not be able to adjust them to the extent that you can if you were using Photoshop CS2 - but then Photoshop CS2 costs about $500 more than Photoshop Elements 5.0. Besides, its a lot easier to learn how to use color curve in Elements.

I know that many people rely on reviews here at Amazon to help them decide whether to buy a product - I know that I do. I think it is unfortunate that an earlier reviewer made claims about this product that are just plain wrong. I encourage anyone considering Elements 5.0 to research the product and not be mislead by inaccurate information as to its content. Personally, I am very happy with it and I do recommend it.

Roberta

All the power of Photoshop for the home user --a must-have for digital photography
I am a huge fan of Adobe Photoshop Elements from the get-go. I've had every version or nearly so since its inception. Designed as a "cut-down" version of Photoshop, the granddaddy of digital image manipulation software, Photoshop Elements is aptly named; it has the elements of Photoshop that most users need, but minus the extra bells and whistles that professional designers might require.

That power of course comes at a price; I found that my 3 year old HP Pavilion needed significant upgrades to run version 5.0. Slow to do graphics in any case, due to onboard Nvidia graphics chips, I added a separate graphics card (a reasonably inexpensive one) and some additional memory since my computer was underpowered in that regard as well. The addition to 1GByte of RAM and the dedicated graphics card made loading and running Photoshop Elements 5.0 possible. It went from molasses and swearing a lot to slick as a cat's hindquarters.

So: Lesson #1--if your computer doesn't have a dedicated graphics card and is underpowered in RAM, consider upgrading or replacing a superannuated model. Ask your local computer guru if you are unsure.

Now, down to the improvements in the software.

1. Enhanced conversion to black & white from color. While "remove color" and sepia (or any) toning was always available, there is now a set function to create black & white from your color digital photo. I use this a lot. As a former person who did her own B&W in the darkroom as a kid, I have of course no time as an adult to process film and Heaven knows printing one print can take hours. I created a handsome photo of some wicker chairs on an old porch in record time with this feature.

2. You can delight your kids (or yourself) by making photo flipbooks--the precursor to movies. Fun and educational. A lovely little feature for homeschoolers and kids' activities.

3. More options for fancy frames, collages. This is in answer to the scrapbooking craze. There are many more ways to make enhanced pictures and photos for digital printing to cards, scrapbook or just to email to friends. Photoshop Elements also has an array of filters that let you make web thingies like glassy buttons and neon highlighted lettering for designing your home web page.

4. As in PSE 4 and 3, you have the option to go from camera download to quick edit, without loading the full editing power of PSE. Organization of the photos and videos has been greatly enhanced in version 5.0

5. Along with organization, there is a new feature Map View which lets you tag your photos to where you took them. And you can share photos with some online features.

6. There are brushes that replicate natural surfaces, natural brushes, fancy shapes. You can create artwork with or without photos by chosing colors, gradients, and add text and create drop shadows, bevels, and other features. You can change photos to have artist effects like pastel strokes or oil daubs.

Downsides?

1. I mentioned the slowness of loading if your computer is underpowered. To give this version a fair test, I upgraded my computer and I recommend you have a minimum of 1GByte RAM and a separate graphics card unless you have a very new, very graphics-oriented PC.

2. If you are a current user of V. 3.0 or so, you may find it is hard to locate some features as they have been reorganized. I still find I have to re-learn how to do a few things because the menus have changed somewhat. The overall layout (drop menus and tabs in the tool sets) is the same.

Finally, the Five-Hundred Dollar Question: Do I need Photoshop or Photoshop Elements? Here's what is NOT available:

CMYK Mode (used for professional printing
LAB color modes
High-bit image tools.
Multiple exposure overlays (HDR)
Channels Palette
Keystroke macros (for repeat manipulations)
Color Balance, Match Color
Layer Masks, Layer Comps, and Quick Mask mode
Smart Objects
Smart Guides
Vanishing Point Tool
Certain adjustment layers such as color balance, curves, selective color, and channel mixer
A complete log of editing history (you can back up using Ctrl-Z but you can't record what you did for batch processing)
Some advanced text formatting and layer style manipulation
no Advanced Color Management, Advanced Web features or ImageReady features like image slice and image rollover (for web design)
Custom menus, setting, anything for batch processing of this sort


Bottom line: if you are a skilled web designer, intend to send images to professional printing or do high-output, repetitive tasks in Photoshop, you are a pro and need the full edition. For the rest of us, PSE 5.0 really does the job. Big thumbs up.

Just keeps getting better with each new version
If you like digital photography, you should buy this product. I have used previous versions since the very first. Each upgrade makes the product better and easier to use. This revision improves the performance of the "magic wand" that can be used to isolate individual objects in the photo, and the handling of colors. The automatic red eye removal is a handy feature, although it is not 100% effective: sometimes you have to show the system where the red eye is. The Organizer is a great way to deal with the thousands of photos you are likely to have on your system after a while, but it does force you to plan ahead on how to catalog the photos. I find that the Date View works best for me, making it easy to find birthday and Thanksgiving photos of the family.

All in all, I highly recommend this product. If you are using a previous version, I recommend you upgrade to this one. You won't be sorry you did.