

#Download photoshop elements 9 for mac manual#
It's not going to replace manual tagging, and some of its choices look a bit strange, but it's an neat innovation nonetheless.What's new in Adobe Photoshop Elements 2022: It's like the face-recognition feature in iPhoto (the Organizer does this too) but extended to other photo properties like high and low quality images, those that are blurred, too light or too dark. Organizer has some very clever tricks, including an Auto Analyzer, which can work through your photo catalogue in the background and apply 'smart tags' to your photos. For many of us it's going to be less confusing than Lightroom, which stores its 'edits' internally, leaving the actual files untouched. It's a kind of 'round-tripping' process, where you select a photo to edit, Organizer sends it to Elements for editing, then Elements sends it back to the Organizer as a new, 'stacked' file. First, the Organizer is not an editing tool – that's left to Photoshop Elements. Sound familiar? It sounds a bit like Lightroom, doesn't it? It can also 'stack' related photos so that they stay together, whether they're sequences of pictures taken at the same time, or multiple 'edits' of the same original file. You can tag images with keywords, create albums for specific projects and events and you can carry out batch processing actions on your files, such as photo edits or file renaming. It can display your whole photo collection, stored across a multitude of different folders, in a single, centralised library. First of all, it's an image cataloguer rather than a file browsing tool like Adobe Bridge.

We need to talk about the Elements Organizer, too, because this is more like a third program than a file browser. Yes, there are still differences (curves, paths, editable vector shapes), but this was the big one. Suddenly, Photoshop Elements is no longer second-best to Photoshop. Never mind all the fancy new effects, gadgets and novice-friendly features in Photoshop Elements 9 – for more experienced users, this will be the big new killer feature.

As any Photoshop fan will know, layer masks are central to a wide range of Photoshop techniques, and the fact that previous versions of Elements didn't support them was a significant drawback (there is a workaround, but it's fiddly).īut look, here they are – you can add a layer mask just by clicking the button at the bottom of the layers palette, and they work just like layer masks do in Photoshop proper. It's essentially a cut-down Photoshop, but it's not cut down by much.Īnd version 9 introduces a feature that closes the gap further – layer masks. Photoshop Elements 9 is designed to be novice friendly, but it's also a serious midrange image-editing application. This presents a simplified set of controls for manually enhancing your pictures, which is a good introduction to basic tonal adjustments.īut this is just one side to this program's character. The Guide Edit mode is one example, the Quick mode is another. You can produce striking images from your photos without having to learn all the technicalities first. This looks more like a work in progress, because while you can see where Adobe is going with this, the results aren't always predictable, or indeed particularly like the 'source' image you're trying to replicate.Įven though Photoshop Elements 9's effects aren't always successful, it does work very hard at giving non-experts lots to play and experiment with. And now, in Elements 9, it can be used to copy the contrast or colour tone of one photo onto another.
