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Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 Adobe is now offering its online site Photoshop.com as an add-on to these two products. Basic use of this site is FREE with a 2 Gigabyte storage limit. If you really want to get with it as far as storage (20 Gigabytes) and get access to all the Photoshop.com features you will have to pay an annual fee for Plus membership ($49.95 Per Year) or purchase the product with the first year upgrade cost included. (LINK TO INFO) After looking at the site and the added features I feel it is well worth the money. Try the free basic membership first to see if it works for you. I tested Photoshop Elements 7 first. The Premiere Elements 7 article will follow. Here is a list of the new and enhanced features as stated by Adobe: Make all your photos extraordinary Do more with your photos Share your photos in exciting ways Let’s see what happened!
Since I now have a Photoshop.com subscription I was greeted with a Backup/synchronization choice before I could move on. I decide to turn on Backup/Sync to protect my photos and albums. That sounds really good to me! NOTE: Adobe is working on expanding the current limit of 200 MB video files at this time. Opening the “Organize” area allows you to find any photo or number of photos you want. There is a text search box on the upper left side of the screen. If you have diligently created Keyword Tags this is really great feature. Since I am a slob of a filer I would have to sit down and create and apply thousands of tags. I like to think I will do this but my hopes are bigger than my will to do so. I do not quarrel with the idea. I just need to take the first step and find a day or two to actually do it. Since Adobe kindly supplied some samples I used them to test the Keyword tagging system and it worked fine. The samples had tags like People, Places, events, other, Architecture, Beach, Cruses, Dancing, Flowers, Halloween, Sports, Wedding, Ship Cruise, Etc.. clicking any one or several of these brought up only the photos so tagged. It seems that you can create new tags and then drag the tag to the photo you wish to relate it to instead of typing each photo tag. That seems much more palatable. I like it. We will see if I use it. The Guided edit feature has been expanded to “Automated Actions” for multi-step results with a few clicks and the much more robust “Photographic Effects” that will help you through more editing sequences. I tested one of these and here is the result. It was easy.
I created a line drawing from a sample photo of Big Ben in seconds. Then I clicked “Adjust Layer Opacity” to bring forward a little of the photo’s color. To make the lines on the drawing about 10 percent clearer I clicked “The “levels” adjustment button. (See results below)
It was fairly easy to use Instant Movie to create an old time movie newsreel with a few photos and an Adobe theme in less than 2 minutes. (LINK TO SLIDE SHOW) I also was able to make a clear digital photo look like it was taken years ago, fix Red Eye and skin tone, Whiten teeth, and make the sky more blue all using Quick Fix. There are more new options in Photoshop Elements 7 than I have time available to test. I will say I was impressed. Like many others I have only scratched the surface of previous versions of Photoshop Elements. Photoshop Elements 7 has made me think and work beyond the basics. I now have a better feel for what is under the hood than I ever did before. |
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