review Adobe - Photoshop Elements 5

Before we get to the good stuff, a small moan. Photoshop Elements 5 joins the growing army of programs that insist on jumping in and doing things you've not asked them to do.

In this instance, your reviewer uses a flash drive to transfer documents between machines. When said flash drive is inserted into the test machine with Photoshop Elements 5 on it, a window jumps up calculating how many image files are contained upon it, offering to help you catalogue them. And while this is a feature that's very useful to some, when added to the raft of other windows that seem to want to open when you plug a flash drive into a standard PC, it's a right royal irritation.

Photoshop Elements 5 is, however, brilliant.
We may as well start with the Organizer function, being as we've been mean to it so far. It's one of the most intuitive, helpful and friendly methods by which to organise images that we've seen to date. You can categorise and arrange your pictures by date, time and content, and these are represented by visual stacks. You can even - and we loved this - highlight on a map where you took the image, and then browse your image collection via a map of the globe.

The original search of your hard drive to find such images takes a little while (although it's faster than it was when we first met such a feature), and you can specify specific folders you want the program to hunt through. But whichever you choose, at the end of the process you'll have your images held together in one place. A neat feature is that the program can automatically correct red eye in the images it finds, although this is an optional tick box and it does take some time.

Once pictures are sorted, it's onto the QuickFix functions. Again, this is a breeze, with a lot of tools on screen at once but arranged in a way so as not to be overbearing. A series of sliders allow you to manually adjust key features of each image, and there are auto fix tools at a single click of the mouse. The program keeps the original image intact until you are entirely happy with the changes you've made, which is in line with the respectful nature of it.

If you need more advanced tools, then a click on the Full Edit tab exposes you to the full bevy of options the program offers. Even these, though, are well implemented and not too troublesome to follow. Working with layers - a nightmare in some image editors - is really quite easy, and there are simple tools to help you to correct the distortion of a camera, for instance. Granted, it's never going to put up a fight against the main Photoshop package, but it's not supposed to, as reflected by its modest price tag, a fraction of what you'd pay for Photoshop CS2.

Finally, when it comes to sharing your work, in addition to the standard file output options you've come to expect, the Web choices are great. Web photo galleries are very easy to create and are a useful way to share your images.