adobe photoshop elements price comparison

^ Shake reduction (centre) is an ambitious challenge, but I prefer the results given by the Unsharp Mask filter (right) We had reasonable success with photos from a high-quality camera taken at ISO 100, but the old Unsharp Mask filter proved to be quicker, more controllable and, to our eyes at least, gave better results. Noise was heavily accentuated, too, so this filter is little use for smartphone pictures. Processed images looked like they had undergone some heavy-handed digital sharpening, with halos around high-contrast lines. Sadly, it’s not as impressive in practice as Adobe would have us believe. It attempts to clean up blurry photos by analysing the shape of blurry streaks in the image and then applying a complex sharpening algorithm to counteract this blur. It’s also pretty tricky for software to deliver. Shake Reduction is a common feature for video-editing software but it’s more unusual for photo editors. It’s not a huge limitation, but it does mean that images are more likely to suffer from noise and colour banding after heavy processing, especially when bringing out details in skies.

One thing it can’t do is process RAW files directly - unlike Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC, Elements’ Haze Removal is limited to JPEGs (or RAW files after converting them to 8-bit colour). There are two modes, one of which is fully automatic, while the other has two controls to adjust the amount of processing and the threshold beyond which areas of the image are deemed to be hazy. For landscape shots, this processing tends to be applied towards the horizon where atmospheric haze pushes tones towards grey.

It analyses the image and boosts the contrast of parts of the image that have less contrast to start with, while leaving more heavily contrasted areas unaffected. The new Haze Removal tool will be familiar to Creative Cloud users, and it makes a welcome appearance here. ^ The Dehaze tool (applied to the right half of this image) boosts the contrast only where it’s needed

Adobe photoshop elements price comparison