Picture perfect

When one first starts up Adobe's Photoshop Elements 2 program, the reaction is like one's first sight of the flight deck of a 747: wow, that's a lot of switches and dials and indicators. The second reaction as one tries to do something with a photo file is much as one would have if asked to fly that 747. What, me? Where do you start? What does that button do? If I press it, will everything go wrong?

Luckily, while pilots – and real Photoshop users – take years to acquire the skills necessary to have control of their charges under all circumstances, Photoshop Elements comes with a rather handy set of help modules. This doesn't mean that it's much less functional; in fact, Elements lacks only a few of the capabilities of the fully fledged and much more expensive Photoshop, long beloved of graphics artists.

Even so, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. Palettes! Masks! Layers! History! Effects! All lurk in icon-heavy columns around the edges of the screen, giving up their secrets only slowly.

We'll deal with the (comparatively arcane) things Elements misses and Photoshop has in a moment. First, why would you want a jetliner of a graphics package, when most people don't think they want to do anything more than resize pictures?

Simple: to make up for the deficiencies in the digital photos that you take. Digital cameras are still far behind their analogue cousins because the lenses haven't reached the same level of sophistication or interchangeability. The other day, I watched someone preparing to take a magnificent picture with his digital camera of a sculpture against an azure winter sky. It was going to be a great photo – except for the huge great railway line passing behind the sculpture, its dirt-brown colour not melding with either of the other two elements. With a conventional (analogue) camera, you could set a large aperture so that the railway would be a blur. Not perfect, but still better.

With a digital photo editor, you could paint out the railway line. In the grown-up Photoshop 7 (the latest version), this is almost trivial: using a function called the "Healing Brush", you can clone one part of a picture in another – say, putting sky where the railway used to be. With Elements, it's slightly harder – that's one of the functions it lacks – but you could do it by copying a chunk of sky and pasting it over the offending railway. It might take a couple of tries, but the beauty of digital is that you don't have to save until you're happy with the result, and you can examine stuff down to the individual pixel level. If, to use the language of the cosmetics industry, you want to get rid of the appearance of wrinkles, there's no better way.

Adobe has been smart here, in recognising that the rise of powerful, cheap digital cameras hasn't been matched by powerful, cheap graphics packages. Some might call Elements a dumbed-down version of Photoshop. But as most people never encounter that package (and wouldn't know where to start if they did), it's a well-priced attack on an emerging market.

It's slightly easier to understand Elements if you know a little about how Photoshop works. But as I said, that's generally not an option. However, it's all made a lot easier by putting aside the computer and actually reading a book. Many people who've tried Elements say that they've been hugely helped by Adobe Photoshop Elements: A Visual Guide to Digital Imaging by Philip Andrews (available from online bookstores).

Certainly, trying to explain why layers and opacity matter is not for the faint-hearted or (like me) the space-limited. But, briefly, with Elements and Photoshop, you can select and copy parts of the picture, create new "layers" (think of sheaves of paper) that contain just those parts, manipulate them, and then "place" them above or below the existing picture, deciding to what extent the original or the new layer should block the view of the other – that is, how opaque it should be.

I realised the power that Photoshop has a couple of years ago, when I saw a stage-by-stage demonstration of how to take a rather dull-looking beach shot and prep up the colours and the person in the foreground so that you end up with something you'd be happy to put on your wall. (There's a good online guide at, for example, http://home.supernet.com/~guntcher/.)

Elements also offers nifty correction systems for red-eye (when you take flash pictures), focus, and interesting effects such as the forbidding-sounding "Unsharp Mask", the picture-sharpener of choice. This works by identifying edges in your picture, then lightening the pixels on the lighter side of the edge and darkening those on the darker side. It can be applied just to particular areas of the picture, so that slightly blurry bits in one place can be corrected, while the rest is left alone.

Remember, though, that just as in all photography, it can't create focus or data that isn't there: if your picture is hopelessly out of focus (due to movement), you're not magically going to make it clean. It'll be better, but messed-up is still messed-up.

Elements won't do everything: it doesn't have options for output to commercial printing. (Why, were you planning to?) But it has "ready for web" output, as well as printing setups. Overall, there's enough to keep the keen photographer busy. And with modern digital cameras able to generate so many pixels, you can hang the resulting 6x4 picture on the wall, and nobody would ever know that it wasn't taken with an analogue. They'd say, "That's a nice picture – you just can't get them the same with digitals these days, can you?"

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 (Macintosh and Windows versions) £69.33