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Leading Photoshop Elements 4.0 available for both Windows and Macs by Alfred DeBat Adobe Systems recently upgraded and expanded its premier photo-imaging program for home users. Based upon professional Photoshop software, the easy-to-use Photoshop Elements 4.0 is now available for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X (OS 10.4 or OS 10.3) computers. Article rating: 5.20

The Windows Photoshop Elements 4.0 is $99.99 (with $20 rebate offer) and the Mac version is $89.99 (with $20 rebate). For $149.99 (with $30 rebate), Windows users can also purchase Elements 4.0 bundled with Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0, which provides software that can turn home videos into Hollywood-like movies with hundreds of special effects. (The rebate offers are valid only within six weeks of purchase and end October 31, 2006.)

Without a doubt, Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 is one of the most powerful digital imaging programs available to family hobbyists. Using simple tutorials, the program allows digital photographers to correct and retouch (eliminating features such as wrinkles, freckles, and red eye) their images to create “perfect” snapshots manually or through a “Quick Fix” command.

Tools perform color and contrast correction, lightening and darkening picture areas, as well as cropping and straightening images. Photoshop Elements has foolproof methods for image manipulation, which can be used to combine images from two or more different photos using its “Magic Extraction” function. The program’s “layering” system lets you do your work, yet you can go back to any previous stage and revise it from that point.

Among the onscreen tools are Paint Brushes, Healing Brushes, Magic Selection Brush, Skin Tone Adjustment, ability to straighten tilting buildings, and special effect filters that produce glows, ripples, and shadows. Another function can seamlessly “stitch” together a series of individual, side-by-side photos that are snapped in an up-to-360-degree circle to make long panoramic pictures.

You can add text and headlines to photos, print colorful borders around pictures and, by employing built-in templates, easily produce a wide number of photo “gift” items on your home color printer. Among the templates are decorative album and scrapbook pages, four-fold greeting cards, photo cards, calendars, and even high-quality, bound books of your photos that are delivered by online providers. The program also offers a library of clip art that can be applied to photos for creative, fun effects, such as eyeglasses, hats, crowns, and other headgear.

You don’t have to be a graphics or digital expert to get results, but it does take a little practice and study of the accompanying 207-page user guide, which offers many show-and-tell illustrations.

In addition to all the digital magic in the program, it also offers many practical how-to functions, such as organizing and locating photos on your computer, uploading and downloading images to and from the Internet, setting up an onscreen computer monitor slide show, and archiving your photos on CDs and DVDs, as well as producing photo DVDs that are playable on TVs via a DVD player (if your computer has a CD or DVD recording drive).

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