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Whats new in Photoshop Elements 4
New in the Organizer
Enhanced Slide Shows – you can now add pan and zoom effects, clip art, text and audio captions and use one of over 80 different transition effects. You can also re-order your images right in the Slide Show Editor and perform some basic editing tasks (crop, rotate, color conversion), or switch to the Photo Editor. I haven’t used this feature, but some folks are really excited about it. This would be awesome for creating a special presentation for birthdays, graduations or weddings where you have a large group of folks gathered together.
Automatic Red-Eye Removal – you can set up PSE to automatically detect and remove red eye as you load new photos into the Organizer, or select a group of your photos for auto red eye fix. Success rate is pretty uneven, and the detection process can be quite slow. Most experienced users are opting to use the manual tool instead.
Face Tagging – if you are using tags, this can be an invaluable feature! While face detection can take a while, it can save you a lot of time in the long run. When you run this feature, it will open a new Face Tagging woindow with a thumbnail for each face along with the Tag Panel with the People categories. Click to tag each face or select multiple thumbnails at the same time.
New in the Editor
Skin Tone Adjustment
Enhance > Adjust Color > Adjust Color for Skin Tone
Use the eyedropper or sliders to adjust skin tone – you may need to play with this a bit to get the effect you want. (Thank goodness for the Undo function, right?)
Magic Selection Brush
The new magic selection brush is available in both the Quick Fix and Standard Edit modes. Using the brush, loosely draw over the area you want to select. Release the mouse button and PSE selects what it ‘thinks’ you want. It’s not perfect, but it will give you a good starting point and you can refine your selection from there.
Magic Extractor
Editor > Image > Magic Extractor
Another tool for complex extractions – use the foreground brush to mark the areas you want to keep, then the background brush to mark the areas you want to remove. Like the Magic Selection brush, you don’t have to be precise. Press Preview to see what PSE ‘thinks’ you want to extract. Unfortunately, it is reported to be pretty slow to process, so be patient as when you try these tools.
Straighten Tool
If you’ve used the crop and straighten tool in previous versions, you know how slow and cumbersome it was to use. In PSE 4.0, you can just click and drag along the horizon line of your photo. Options allow you to select whether it should crop the photo so the new, rotated version has no border, resize the canvas to show the whole image, or crop the rotated photo to the original size.
New Font Menu
This is one of the reasons I finally broke down and upgraded! Each font is now displayed in the drop-down menu with a sample in its own typeface. While this may not replace The Font Thing or other font managers for those of us with hundreds of fonts, it is a big help in selecting among installed fonts only. A quick tip, take the plunge and install your favorite scrapbooking fonts, rather than simply loading them when you need them.
Noise Reduction Filter
The noise reduction filter has a new option to reduce JPEG artifacts from overcompression.
Auto Red Eye Fix
This is a new option in the quick fix mode of the Editor. You may still want to do this fix manually; results with this are a bit inconsistent.
Crop Tool
Enhanced with additional preset sizes (Hooray! This is a big plus for me – it seemed so backward to have to do this manually in earlier versions.)
Multiple Layer Control
Select multiple layers in the layers palette using Shift-click and Ctrl-Click instead of having to link layers. This comes in handy if you like to create tags in a separate document. Instead of copying a flattened version to your layout, you can copy each layer and retain the ability to edit the tag.
16-Bit Color
Enhanced support for 16-bit photos in Camera Raw, Levels, Shadows/Highlights and select filters, including the Liquify filter.
Removed from PSE 4.0
File Browser
To compensate for the removal of the file browser, Organizer now lets you browse folders with unmanaged pictures.
Auto Fix Window
The auto fix window in the Organizer is gone.
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