Adobe Photoshop has been an industry standard for image editing and processing for many years now. In order to cater to the consumer and hobbyist market Adobe released Photoshop Elements. Version 8 is the latest offering in this family of products at an affordable price.

What you get with Photoshop Elements is a great program for editing and touching up digital images. It has great tools such as red eye removal and simple color and lighting effects. For some of the more common digital photography functions Elements is better suited than the full blown Photoshop as it gives you these right on the tool palette without having to search for them.

The strongest feature of Elements may be its Elements Organizer feature. This allows you to easily find and sort your images, and it can even browse removable media such as cameras and flash drives so you do not have to hunt for them.

What Elements does not have is a set of the professional level tools found in the full Photoshop. Most notably missing were web slices and advanced blending effects. So if you are a professional digital artist, graphic designer, or web designer Photoshop Elements is not for you and you will need to shell out for the full package.

Overall, I give Adobe Photoshop Elements an 8 on our d10 scale for its slick user interface and ease of use for the casual hobbyist or digital photo junky. Its lack of the more professional level tools makes it a deal breaker for me, but for 90% of the people out there, its priced just right and does what they need.