Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

This is an amazing product. It's a picture browser, picture organizer and a picture editor. It pretty resource intensive, but I think it's worth it. I use Acdsee also (since Acdsee32 until Acdsee 8.0 - latest version), and it's much faster than Adobe's product, but it's also less refined.

As a picture browser it's slow. As a picture organizer it's very good. As a picture editor it's more than ok.

One feature that I like it's tags: pictures can be dragged onto a category tag and the tag appears to every picture in that selection. You can create Event tags, Place tags, People tags... and each tag has an picture (or a selection from a picture) to illustrate it. You can associate one photo with any of the tags (you can have multiple People or Event tags for one picture). Once you put the tags, you can select all the pictures from a particular Event, containing certain Person or persons... and even: every picture that wasn't made in a particular Place but it contains a certain Person... Displayed pictures can also be restricted to a certain time interval.


Other nice feature you have it's people's faces identification. It's not as high-tech as you would think but it does find almost all the faces in a particular selection. It presents a list of crops from your selection containing just the faces of those persons. If you have multiple persons in a certain picture, all the crops will be there.

It's nice to rotate your pictures with just Ctrl + Left or Ctrl + Right (and it's working on selections too).
Auto red-eye removal will do automatically the work if the photo's EXIF "Flash used" flag indicates true.

A good thing it's photo stack: you can select some pictures and stack them for whatever reason: they present the same scene, there are several shots of the same subject, they represent several edits/versions of the same picture... It saves your space (all the pictures in the stack are represented by one single picture), and it makes it easier to navigate through your collection. You can unstack them whenever you want.

Also nice it's the compare feature in the Full Screen Preview screen. You can split your screen and choose pictures to be displayed in either left or right panel (if you want this split screen feature).

It does some complicated slide shows. Has lots of transitions and effects and the working environment resembles with a non-linear editing software.

One of the best features is by far Quick edit and Standard Edit. It's more like a lite version of Photoshop. You have all the tools, plus new ones over CS2: relating to selection and color matching (You can select something by drawing with a red pen over the desired area. The program will try to select in a continuous area all the similar pixels you've drew over. You can balance starting from a neutral - white/gray color. You can balance colors based on skin color tone. etc.)

It's a realy good, polished product. You can see it here and you can download a tryout version here (you'll need a username/password pair and you can obtain it from bugmenot)