PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 8

Photoshop’s streamlined sibling Elements comes with the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in for converting RAW files.

Although not as well featured as the Adobe Photoshop CS5 version, under the Basic tab controls in Photoshop elements 8 are identical, though, providing great exposure correction and contrast enhancement. There’s also sharpening, Noise reduction and many of the same tools for cropping, reducing red eye, or altering White Balance.
More advanced features like localised adjustment tools, access to the colour channels, geometric distortion correction and the Tone Curve are absent, so Elements really only caters for simple conversions. In the Mac version, Adobe Bridge is included for a library function but for PC users you’ll need to use the built-in Organiser feature for rating and filtering images. Performance is excellent with adjustments happening in real-time as you tweak the sliders, making the conversion process an enjoyable one. Batch processing is also possible, applying the same adjustments across multiple files, but from the plug-in itself you can only save to .dng, which gets frustrating if you want to batch convert RAW files to a JPEG format.

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