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Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 [Mac]

From: Adobe
Category: Software

List Price: ~~$99.99~~
Buy New: $78.99
You Save: $21.00 (21%)

New (27) from $78.99

Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

69 reviews
Sales Rank: 29

Format: CD-ROM
Platform: Mac OS X Intel
Media: DVD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Operating System: Mac OS X Intel
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 6 x 8 x 4

MPN: 65045164
Model: 65045164
UPC: 883919176444
EAN: 0883919176673
ASIN: B002ID8R34

Release Date: October 14, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Features:

•	Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 combines power and simplicity so you can easily go beyond the basics to tell great stories with your photos
•	Make your photos look extraordinary with easy-to-use editing options--whiten teeth, recompose photos, remove unwanted elements and more
•	Share your stories in beautiful, personalized print creations and on web galleries
•	Easily manage all your photos and video clips from one convenient place
•	Compatible with iPhoto

Extraordinary photos. Amazing stories.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 software for Mac offers a complete solution for photos:

Make your photos look extraordinary with easy-to-use editing options.
Share your stories in beautiful, personalized print creations and on web galleries.
Easily manage all your photos and video clips from one convenient place.

Top reasons to buy Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac

The toolbar says it all.

Quickly recompose your photos to any size. Click to enlarge.

Clean up and create composites with Photomerge. Click to enlarge.

Do it all with one powerful yet easy-to-use product
Use Photoshop Elements 8 for all your photo needs. Edit and enhance photos, make unique photo creations, share in print and on the web, and easily manage your photos.

Dramatically transform your photos with easy-to-use tools
Convert your color originals to elegant, nuanced black-and-whites, or use color curves adjustments to get the perfect exposure.

Go from flawed to phenomenal in seconds.

Adjust color, contrast, and lighting.

Whiten teeth.

Make skies a vibrant blue.

Count on step-by-step assistance
Want to touch up a scratch? Create a scrapbook page? Add artistic effects that make a photo look like a pencil sketch? Photoshop Elements walks you through key steps to make it easy to get the results you want fast.

Easily create the perfect photo
Take advantage of amazing Adobe Photomerge technology to easily create perfect group shots and seamless panoramas as well as combine elements of different faces for entertaining results.

Show off your creativity with flexible layouts
Make amazing printed photo creations--like scrapbook pages, photo books, and cards--that you can customize to get exactly the look you envision.

Easily use with iPhoto
Photoshop Elements offers a complete solution for organizing, editing, creating, and sharing your photos. It is compatible with iPhoto, so when you want to go beyond the basics and do more fun stuff with your photos, count on Photoshop Elements for the power and simplicity to easily tell great stories with your photos.

Top new benefits of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac

Recompose photos to any size without distortion
Ever want to change the size or orientation of a photo to fit a certain frame? Now you can resize--even going from landscape to portrait or vice versa--without distorting key subjects like people or buildings.

Get the best exposure
Want to capture all the details in a scene that includes light and dark areas? Snap one photo with flash on and one with flash off, and Photomerge Exposure will combine the shots into a single, perfectly lit photo.

Quickly clean your scene of unwanted elements
You took five shots of your subject, but pedestrians and cars distract from the scene in every one. Now, use Photomerge Scene Cleaner to simply brush away any elements that changed positions between photos, and create a composite with just the look you want.

Select and apply with a single stroke
Simultaneously select a specific photo area and apply incredible effects with a single stroke of Adobe Smart Brush. Improve lighting, add rich textures, and more with 8 libraries of over 50 sophisticated effects.

Go from flawed to phenomenal in seconds
Get just the photo fixes you're looking for with new one-step shortcuts that whiten teeth and make skies a vibrant blue.

Quickly retouch skin and soften other surfaces
Soften surfaces while keeping edges and details crisp with a Surface Blur filter that works great on portrait shots.

Choose the best result
Perform a full range of common photo adjustments--including color, contrast, and lighting--with just one click. Then choose the best result from a group of adjustment previews.

Share in fresh ways on the web
Share your photos in new, eye-catching web gallery templates that let you preview before you create.

Give your creations fresh looks
Experiment with new artwork and templates to give your printed creations fun and stylish new looks.

Customer Reviews:

Showing reviews 1-5 of 69

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Worth the upgrade October 23, 2009
Michael McKee (Port Townsend, WA United States)
165 out of 168 found this review helpful

When Adobe skipped version the Mac with version 7 of Elements, I wondered if there would be another upgrade. I'm glad that 8 came out, and at the same time as the Windows version. I often wait a version or two between upgrading but there's enough here to make the new purchase worth it to me.

I'm a fan of this program. It is all that most photographers need. Actually it does much more than most people who own it ever get to. If you are not a graphic designer, Elements is great. I've said this in prior reviews of Elements but it's a much better value than the CS version of Photoshop and up to some heavy duty image editing. You won't be able to edit photos more effectively with the full version of Photoshop. I've challenged pros to do editing with Photoshop CS that I can't do with Elements and so far haven't had to eat crow. That's not saying that Elements has *all* the tools that CS does. But Photoshop has always offered multiple ways to get things done and Elements has enough tools to do the job. The photo tools are there, though.

With this version there are some compelling new features. The first I'll mention is not really emphasized in the Adobe marketing info, but is a wonderful set of tools for photo editing. That's Adobe Camera Raw 5.5 (ACR). ACR isn't actually part of Elements but included with the program. It basically gives the same editing tools available in Adobe's Lightroom. I often use ACR to edit photos and get the majority of my work done there. This is a quality addition that most people don't know about. The upgrade in ACR from version 4 which comes with Elements 6 to version 5 adds some really useful photo editing tools.

Another add on to Elements is Adobe Bridge, which a lot of pros use to sort and catalog their images and video. It's also a quality program in its own right and the center of my photo workflow. It can be well integrated with Elements and is probably worth the cost of the whole bundle on its own. It also plays nice with iPhoto if you want to keep your pictures stored there.

Now to Photoshop Elements 8. Besides the upgrade to ACR, the updates that our Windows brethren got in version 7 have been included, as well as some excellent tools for making composite photos from multiple images. They're slick and very easy to use. There are some one step editing tools that are new to the Mac version and a totally cool way to squeeze a photo into a smaller space without squashing the import parts of the picture. The photomerge can save the day with group shots. Simply take several pictures. The use Elements to switch the picture of your brother in law with his eyes closed for one where he looks awake. It's seamless and easy.

Elements makes sharing your images easier, too with streamlined web albums and slideshow capibility. There's even a send to iPhone function.

Any down sides? Well, Adobe's installer seems to take forever and it helps to have a fairly new computer with a decent amount of RAM. Elements wants some power to perform quickly. And the program is complicated. Though it is much easier to learn than Photoshop CS4. The upside is that since it's so popular there are a lot of good books, web tutorials and classes to help.

This is a solid upgrade to an already excellent program. I recommend it strongly. It's has all the editing power that most photographers need, without the price tag of the full Photoshop. I'd even go so far as to say that if you even question if it's good enough it is. Photoshop CS4 is a professional program with extra professional features, few of which are actually photo realted.

5 out of 5 stars

Worth every penny December 5, 2009
ksuwildkat (Monterey, CA)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

I have used Elements since version 2 and this version replaced version 4 for me. Unlike 3 and 4, I found version 5 was a step backwards and 6 worse. When Adobe skipped 7 I was afraid 8 would be a step backwards too. It isnt. After just 3 days I was happy to remove my copy of PSE4. Even without the rebate, this version for Mac is worth every dime.

What's new

The most obvious change is the interface color. Matching Lightroom and bridge, you now work on black. I have been using Lightroom for a while so it was not a big change for me. A side effect of this is to make the color tools stand out far more and tools that were previously B&W are now color. That took longer to get used to and it is probably the most "disturbing" of the interface changes.

Unlike the Windows version, PSE 8 for Mac includes a full copy of Adobe Bridge CS4. The version of Bridge in PSE 4 never worked on any of my Macs but CS4 is rock stable. Bridge is completely integrated with PSE 8 if you want it to but you are not forced to use it. If you are already using Lightoom or Aperture, Bridge is probably redundant. If you are using iPhoto and shooting a lot of RAW, Bridge will probably be very useful. I personally found RAW processing in iPhoto very frustrating and iPhoto really bogs down when you start adding lots of 16MB files. I have no uses for Faces or Places in iPhoto and got tired of waiting for Faces to run.

Editing now has three options - Full, Quick and Guided. Guided is like a Q&A session. I wont ever use it and I doubt anyone will use it very long. Quick resembles Lightroom's editing options in the Library view with basic lighting, color and sharpness adjustments. Quick also includes tools to automatically whiten teeth, make skies blue, remove redeye and convert to B&W. Full has the full range of tools you would expect from PSE.

Two new tools are the Recompose tool and Magic Extractor. Used together, they allow you to radically change photographs quickly and easily. Magic Extractor does exactly what you would think - lets you remove just about anything from a picture. Using colored brushes you tell PSE what you want out and what you want left alone. You preview the results and if they work, hit ok. The most obvious application is to remove unwanted people or things from a picture and the results are excellent. Its not really magic, just automation of the laborious process of selecting and then removing that you have always been able to do. What is magical is the Recompose tool. If that person you removed happened to be in the middle of the picture, even replacing them with blue sky can make the image look "Photoshoped." Recompose can "squish" the picture together while keeping the rest of the picture normal. Have too much sky between your subject and that beautiful orange sun? Move it down. Ex-Boyfriends or embarrassing aunts will never ruin a photo again!!

Improved

Lots of things have been improved but a few stand out. Sharpening is now available as in the Enhance menu as well as filters. Same tool, just in a second, more logical, place. The new "Convert to B&W" tool is a combination of remove color, brightness and contrast, levels and hue/saturation. Healing Brush and Spot Healing brush are much improved with Spot Healing now my preferred way to remove blemishes on faces. The awful stand alone help program has been replaced by web based help. True it wont work if you are not on the net but I found the Help in version 4 so bad I relied on the web anyway. Create and Share have new ways to make things with your pictures but I dont use either so I dont know how good they are.

Under the hood

I appreciate all the new tools and the new interface but the single biggest change is the in the core of the program. PSE 8 requires a multi-core Intel processor and while that may seem like a bad thing, it isnt. Getting rid of the legacy code for PPC processors and older versions of OSX has made PSE 8 faster, smaller and far more stable. No more emulation, no more Universal Binary fat. Its not often that a newer program runs better on older hardware but in this case, it absolutely does. I have an original Intel MacBookPro (2006) and the difference is HUGE. If you own an Intel Mac and are using any older version of PSE, you will absolutely notice the improvement in speed and how well it gets along with other programs.

Bottom Line

I use PSE every day and I was very disappointed in both version 5 and 6. Adobe has more than made up for it with version 8. This is the biggest and best upgrade since v2-v3 and the first to ever use fewer resources than the previous version (as long as you have an Intel Mac). I was debating the big jump to full PS CS4 (student cost is very reasonable) but didnt want to sacrifice the speed and compactness that PSE offers on my older system. Next year is "Desktop Upgrade" year and I will wait until then to get CS4 but even then, I dont see PSE coming off my laptop (or my wife's). Highly recommended.

5 out of 5 stars

Lots of room to grow. November 27, 2009
Personne (Rocky Mountain West)
15 out of 17 found this review helpful

Elements 8 is a lion in sheep's clothing. It's sold as a starter program, but you'll find it's lacking very little. I've spent a few years tweaking photos with the full version of Photoshop, and that's what I use in most cases. But full Photoshop can be awfully daunting, and sometimes its raw power can give you too many choices if you're just starting out. I decided to see what Elements brought to the table.

It brings an awful lot to the table, indeed. You can import shots in whatever form your camera or scanner provides, including RAW. You can start with an inexpensive point-and-shoot and grow your way into a DSLR, all the time using the same powerful tool to enhance and clean up your shots.

Among the most important tools included here are tools to correct basic problems with your shot. You can correct perspective (notice how big the feet of that statue were when you stood at the bottom and shot up toward the head?). You can correct barrel and pincushion distortion, shrinking the nose of that person who was a little close to the camera. If the camera was tilted, you can easily fix the angle. If you have vignetting issues (illumination around the edges) those are easy to fix. This is grown-up stuff, but it's easy to do.

Everyone has faced the situation of taking a picture with too much illumination behind the subject. There may be a lot more detail in the image than is obvious. The useful shadow/highlight tool can brighten up those faces and darken the lights in the background. There are of course sharpening tools (use carefully), along with tools to correct red-eye and color balance issues from flash photography. Many of these are pretty obvious to use, but there is considerable help only a mouse-click away.

As you get better at editing photographs, you'll appreciate the value of good selection tools. Most of the time, you only want to work on a portion of an image--sharpening here, desaturating there. Elements provides pretty much the entire suite of Photoshop selectors, including the magic wand (which selects by color attributes). You can grow, shrink, smooth and feather your selections with ease. You will also appreciate the fact that you can see and edit EXIF data. This includes the data provided by your camera, including focal length, exposure, aperture, and ISO). I have learned so much from studying that information. You can also work in layers--tremendously useful if you want to apply different processing to different parts of the image or if you want to combine images. And finally, your files are compatible with full Photoshop.

There are creative tools as well. You can draw (and drawing is pressure-sensitive, in case you're using a tablet). There are filters to create painterly effects and distortions such as glass or paper. There are tools for combining and recompositing images, too.

I've included a brief series of images in the image gallery for Elements 8, illustrating my steps through processing a single image. Perhaps you'll find it helpful. All in all, I find Elements 8 to be a flexible and powerful program that you could use to do quality work for years.

5 out of 5 stars

Great features at a good price. November 18, 2009
James Peterson (Savannah, GA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

For the casual user like me, it works great and does more than I'll probably ever need. Simple to use quickly, with easy to use features. I can get the results I need and I haven't had to read the first page of instruction. Bridge seems usable, and give a quick way to find the best shots and manage all of them too.

5 out of 5 stars

Does not work on my 2007 MacBook Pro November 19, 2009
T. A. Simmerson Jr.
20 out of 24 found this review helpful

I run CS4 at home on my windows machine but wanted something that I could use on the road for my Mac. I purchased Elements 8.0 thinking it was going to be a great, easy to use program for editing pictures quickly from my hotel room...wrong! After I installed the program I was greeted by the familiar Adobe Bridge, no issues. The problems started when I attempted to edit a raw photo in Adobe Raw which is supposed to be included with Elements 8.0. Every time I right click and ask to open Adobe Raw, I get an error saying I need to first open a qualifying product. I did get it to open once however, now I just get the never ending spin of death icon when I attempt to open a raw image and I have to force quit. Second issue, whenever I attempt to open a raw image in Elements I get the same spinning death icon, I waited five minutes at one point for it to open a raw image...no dice and had to force quit. So, I deactivated and re-installed. When I went to re-install I saw that Adobe PSE had somehow eaten 600mb of my hard drive, I had 70GB the first time and 69.4GB during the second installation. I just finished up the re-install and I am having the same problems. I am going to try a fresh version of snow leopard and see if it works. Frustrating to say the least, I thought Macs were supposed to be pain free.

My comp specs.
MacBook Pro
2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo
4GB Ram

Update: After some initial tweaking I was able to get Elements to work. It now works just fine with no issues to speak of.

Showing reviews 1-5 of 69

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