Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 review

There’s always an air of suspicion around software products that release a new version at the same time every year. Do they contain a set of brilliant new features, or are they being shoved out to meet an arbitrary deadline?

Last year’s refresh of Adobe Photoshop Elements was certainly no makeweight, bringing the superb Content Aware Fill feature from the full-fat version of Photoshop, allowing photographers to make stray objects disappear as if they never existed. Alas, this year’s refresh lacks any such sparkle.

In fact, fire up Photoshop Elements 10 and you’d initially be hard pressed to spot the difference over last year’s version. The divisive grey-on-black design of the Organizer remains, with Adobe admitting an overhaul is high on its priority list for next year’s refresh. There are, however, new features lurking beneath the surface.

Object search, for example, theoretically allows you to highlight objects in photos, and find others in the library containing the same subject. It’s far from flawless, however: our test search on a photo of a horse returned photos of people, while even searches for a very distinctive lighthouse delivered photos of other objects above those of the lighthouse itself.

A similar feature designed to search for duplicate photos in your library works a little better, allowing you to group the duplicates into stacks so that they don’t consume so much space in the Organizer’s home screen.

The Elements Organizer has been more tightly knitted to popular social networks. Elements can now download your Facebook friends list and use this to tag people in your photos; those tags are preserved when the snaps are uploaded to the site, saving you from having to enter the same data twice. It’s also easier to upload videos to YouTube (with support for Full HD files), although this will naturally be of more use to users of Premiere than of Photoshop Elements.

Elements’ editing tools have also received a minor spruce up. The cropping tools now come with a choice of overlays, including the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratio, helping you to deliver more technically adept compositions.