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VERDICT: A new interface, smart albums, guided editing and photo merging but comparatively little to boost core efficiency.

Organizing and enhancing thousands of digital photographs is a time-consuming task and the digital camera owner needs dedicated help to make the process as productive and enjoyable as possible...

Key to this is the working environment and the biggest change to the latest version of the market-leading Photoshop Elements is a complete interface overhaul. Everything looks cleaner and more streamlined with a greater focus on your images. Most significant is the reworking of the side taskbar which now offers consistent centralized access to the program’s core functionality through four main tabs - Organize, Fix/Edit, Create and Share – that are shared between the program’s separate Organizer and Editor modules.
The Organizer module is Elements’ standout strength and has long set the standard for image management with advanced features such as version stacking, face tagging, location mapping, ad-hoc collections (now renamed “albums”) and camera raw support (enhanced again). The main introduction in this release is the “smart album” which automatically pulls out selections of images based on criteria that you specify. Simple examples include all photos taken in the last six months or shot with a certain camera, but you can also combine more advanced criteria to, for example, pull out all images rated four stars or above taken within one mile of a given location.

The Organizer benefits from the cleaner interface and new smart albums

The Organizer should also play an important role for quickly enhancing images and the range of editing commands it offers has been expanded and brought together under a new Fix tab. In practice however, the new corrections for colour, contrast and levels are purely automatic meaning that they either work or they don’t and the only hands-on control provided is cropping. The end result is that, for all but the simplest enhancements, you still have to load your images into the separate Editor module. At least the enhanced Photo Bin at the bottom of the Editor workspace now makes it easier to work through all those images currently selected in the Organizer or in a particular album.
In terms of editing power, the dedicated Quick Fix workspace’s slider-based control over lighting, colour and sharpness is largely unchanged but you can now retrospectively refine edges when working with selections made with the near-magical Quick Selection tool. There’s also a new alternative Guided Edit workspace which provides handholding and access to more advanced power for straightening images, removing colour casts, touching up scratches and correcting skin tones. Pulling out these core capabilities from the Full Edit mode is certainly a step forward in terms of usability but, rather than complicating things with another workspace, it would have been more efficient to merge these tools into the Quick Fix environment, or better still directly in the Organizer.