Abobe Photoshop Elements: Elements of the Real Thing Ease of Use a Selling Point Scott Koegler
Ease of Use a Selling Point
New users of Photoshop are often scared away by the plethora of menus, pallets, and options that give Photoshop its tremendous depth of capability. While Photoshop Elements uses a similar 'palletized' interface with floating menus, it adds a context-sensitive "Hints" panel that displays information about the operation you're performing. Its graphical presentation is inviting and intuitive, and is similar to Windows hints, but contains a couple paragraphs of explanation and a link to the help section where you get a very detailed and highly understandable set of instructions for using the function.
Finding a file in our labyrinth of folders was simplified by the graphical file browser. It's not nearly the equivalent of Adobe's companion program to Elements, Photo Album, but it does a nice job of displaying thumbnails as well as details of the files you're browsing. The Recipes pallet is another helpful tool that helps guide you through common operations. In fact, Recipes are semi-automated explanations of frequently used functions.
To start off with using Photoshop Elements, we selected a shot of a house typical of what a real estate agent might take to show off a property. The basic shot contained a decent image, but it needed some help. The dark areas were too dark, the pumpkins on the front stoop dated the shot, and the house needed to occupy more of the area. We started out with Photoshop Element's cropping function. The Recipe pallet listed Crop a Photo, so we clicked it and got a list of steps with the offer "do this for me."
The instructions were clear and we had Elements start the crop operation for us. When we had the area defined, we hit enter and the image was cropped. We found this same kind of help available for the other functions necessary to make the highlight as well as the erase functions.
Making the changes shown in the final picture took about five minutes, which is pretty quick for a typical batch of image manipulation tasks. Part of the reason the features were easy to use was because the Recipes led us step by step through the processes. Even if we had known the concepts, the Recipies took care of finding the right functions in the menus, saving us the time of searching through the menus and help pages.
