Adobe Photoshop Elements is one of the best bargains in the photo-editing market: for a fraction of the cost of Photoshop, you get a full complement of editing tools, guided tutorials for improving your photos, as well as lots of other features aimed at helping you create cards, collages, photo montages and more. With version 8, Adobe hasn't made radical changes: they've added a few new tools, beefed up the Guided Edit and Quick Edit modes, and adopted some of the look of Photoshop CS4. Overall, it's a solid--if light--upgrade to an already good product.
Organization
As I noted in my first look, the Mac and Windows versions of Photoshop Elements 8 are identical. The bundled software, however, is not. Whereas the Windows version comes with Organizer, a user-friendly program for managing and tagging images, the Mac version includes Adobe Bridge CS4, a more complex cataloging tool that works with all kinds of files, not just photos. Although not as intuitive as the Organizer for some tasks (adding keyword tags is a bit more cumbersome, for example), Bridge provides solid integration with Elements, includes a very good full-screen review mode, and works satisfactorily as a general photo browser.
There are a few Organizer features that Bridge lacks, most notably online backup of photos to Adobe's Photoshop.com service, and the ability to upload photos from the Organizer to photo-sharing sites like Flickr, Photoshop.com, and SmugMug. Mac users can still get a free Photoshop.com account with 2GB of storage, but photos must be uploaded via a Web browser, and there are no provisions for storing backups of your photos.
If you use iPhoto as your primary photo catalog, you can easily set it up (using iPhoto's General preferences) so that you edit photos in Elements 8. So long as you work only with JPEG or TIFF files, perform only basic editing tasks in Elements, and are careful to save the file without changing the file format, the edited photo automatically shows up in iPhoto. However, if you create a more complex file from your original--or you want to edit Raw files within Elements--and thus have to save it in a different format, you'll need to take the extra step of importing the updated version manually into iPhoto. This isn't a limitation on Adobe's part--it's iPhoto's database and folder structure that gets in the way here. Elements 8 does make one nice improvement to process of exchanging files with iPhoto: the Open dialog box now lets you directly open photos from your iPhoto or Aperture library (version 6 let you see the photos, but not open them).
Editing
Elements 8 looks different from version 6, largely because Adobe has updated the program to use Photoshop CS4's panel interface (including the use of tabbed documents, similar to those in Safari or Firefox). I found that the new look was a big improvement over Elements 6, but the changes are largely cosmetic; you'll find that things mostly work as they did before. And, for those people who thought that Elements 6's dark gray look was too dark, you can now set a preference to change it to very light gray--a questionable improvement to my eyes as I generally find the Mac's dark interface more readable than that on the Windows version.
Of the major new features, the Smart Brush and Recompose tools are the most successful in their implementation. Making selections in Photoshop Elements gets easier with each version, and the Smart Brush tool pushes this even further. The Smart Brush lets you create quick selections and then add versatile adjustment-layer effects, such as bluer skies, black-and-white effects, whiter teeth, and other portrait enhancements. For many users, the concept of making selections and masks can be overwhelming (and time-consuming); the Smart Brush tool really helps simplify these tasks and lets you immediately see results without having to go through multiple steps. It's a winning combination.
Likewise, the Recompose tool,
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