Photoshop Elements

What: Editing and organizational software for digital photography

By: Adobe Systems, Inc.

Cost: $89.99 CD ROM; $79.99 downloaded

Download: www.adobe.com

Photoshop Elements brings much of the power of Adobe's professional Photoshop program to the digital photo hobbyist. It imports photos from digital cameras, scanners, CDs, and storage media and provides a photo organizer.

The Quick Fix workspace allows quick adjustments such as red-eye corrections and cropping, while the Standard Edit workspace is where the more professional color and lighting adjustment tools and features such as layers and filters reside. When you're finished editing, Photoshop Elements helps you share photos by automatically resizing them for e-mailing and allowing you to preview them in different file formats and settings before you save them for the Web.

The figure shows the more advanced Standard Edit workspace, which contains all of the tools in the Quick Fix space and more. The File Browser, with thumbnails of stored photos, is open in the center.

Why I like it: Photoshop Elements is all the Photoshop most users will ever need at a fraction of the price of its full professional counterpart.