Blossoming digital photographers with entry-to-mid-level digital cameras and entry-to-mid-level photo printers, will find the iPhoto application included in Mac OS X to be more than sufficient. iPhoto is a competent digital light table, and really excels in integration with email, ordering prints and desktop books, making gorgeous slideshows, and providing access to your photos for use in other iLife applications like iMovie and iDVD.

However, as you get more serious about digital photography, you’ll run into some limitations in iPhoto, particularly with editing images to make them look their best.

The industry standard for digital photo editing is Adobe’s Photoshop. You name it – Photoshop can do it. However, Photoshop is expensive, and sports numerous features that only pros will covet. If you’re moving past iPhoto’s relatively limited editing features, but can’t afford the cost (in both cash and time it takes to learn) of Photoshop, there is an alternative.

It’s called Photoshop Elements 3.0. It’s “Photoshop Lite”, if you will. Think of the word “Elements” in the name referring to having “the must-have, good stuff” in Photoshop, without some of the overhead or price. Speaking of price, right now there’s a special offer on Amazon.com, which can bring you Elements for $49.99 after $40 mail-in rebate. That’s a great price.

Here’s just a few feature highlights. A new “Quick Fix” palette gathers together the most popular lighting, color, contrast, and sharpness adjustment controls in one location. A new “Smart Fix” button applies automatic adjustments, similar to iPhoto’s “Enhance” button. Just about every photo requires some cropping, and Elements 3.0 adds Crop Presets, which you can use to easily crop photos to conform to different print sizes.

Elements 3.0 has an improved Healing Brush for removing blemishes, dust on camera lenses, and “owies” on those cute baby faces (of all ages, of course). It also provides support for Camera Raw. Camera Raw, or just “Raw”, is the term for a digital image format gaining popularity among professionals and “serious hobbyists”. To make a short story long, most cameras export photos in JPEG format. The image is actually compressed by software in the camera itself. More and more cameras offer the Raw format, which provides an uncompressed image with more information for you to manipulate in, well, Photoshop Elements 3.0.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski