A Preview of Photoshop Elements 7 Part 1

The main advantage to the program is that it's less expensive than Photoshop and Lightroom, yet is powerful enough for most photo editing tasks.

Consequently, the improved raw workflow is quite improved; basically you now can bypass it entirely if you want. For instance, in order to create a slide show of NEF files, the program will simply apply the default raw-processing settings and treat them like JPEGs.

There is also a new text search box in the organizer, which is a fast, easy way to filter by keywords or basic metadata. Be warned however that it is very basic metadata only; you can only search on time, data, camera, and caption text. But that should be sufficient for basic home users.

Obviously there is always one new and incredible feature per version; Elements 7 is no different and has the Photomerge Scene Cleaner which is an extension of Group Shot. It allows you to seamlessly combine variations of a photo to eliminate unwanted objects in the scene.

Typically features like these never work for me without a great bit of work on my end; amazingly enough this one did, on two random photos (which met the similarity criteria). I haven't tried the other variations, Photomerge Faces, or Panorama–but those are derivative of existing Photoshop CS3 tools.