Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0
I take a lot of photos — I’ve averaged just under 7,000/year for the last several years. I’ve been looking for a good program to track, organize and edit all of those photographs for the past couple years with little success. The basic problem was everything that had the power to do what I wanted was $200 or more, while everything at the lower end also had lower serious deficiencies.
The past few days I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0, which combines the old Elements and Album programs into one, and it seems to be able to do everything that a non-professional would need at a reasonable price.
Adobe has finally included the feature whose absence in prevoius versions was a deal killer — after you’ve tagged your photos to your heart’s delight, the program will write the tags to the individual files as IPTC keywords. This means you’re not stuck using Adobe’s proprietary database to track your photographs, but can switch at a whim to any program capable of importing IPTC keywords from the image files.
There are still some minor gotchas — the biggest being that if you rename or delete a tag within Photoshop Elements, the program will not rename or delete the tag in the image files. So once the tag is written as a keyword to the file, you’re stuck with it unless you want to use a third party utility. This was apparently done to prevent users from inadvertently deleting tags in files that were placed there by other programs. I’d prefer some sort of override pref, but it’s a minor annoyance rather than a deal breaker.
Elements continues to be improved and perfected as an excellent photo-editing centric program suitable for those of us who don’t want to have to learn the full version of Photoshop or would prefer something with a smaller featureset for basic photo editing.
Tags: Uncategorized