I have never had photoshop before, but decided to get it to change over to digital scrapbooking. A friend had an older version that she tutored me on and I was excited to get my own software. I did the trial version of PSE8 and wasn’t impressed- it crashed all the time and was a pain to use- but part of that could be that I was still learning how to use it. After reading a number of reviews I decided to purchase version 7. I found it much easier to use than version 8, though I have read there is not much difference between 7 & 8, but the things I tried on 8 didn’t work, but they did on 7- so I’m not sure what the difference is. 7 has been easy to work with and I have not had a problem with the system crashing. I used the trial version of 8 for one month without much sucess, and I’ve had 7 now for 2 months and am very pleased. Great product!

Photoshop Elements is a lower priced version of Photoshop, lower priced because it lacks all of the functionality of Photoshop. It is therefore quite reasonable to think that it is suitable for someone who just wants to do a limited range of things to their digital photographs – this was my expectation. It will perform these simple things but I do not believe that this is the best program for this purpose – it is very complex and it does not come with a manual. Thus, in order to be able to use the multitude of features of the program, one has to buy a manual for about $40 USD. Without a manual I was able to do simple things like removing red eye, improving the contrast and color, cropping, and reducing the file size for an e-mail, but going beyond this without a manual was beyond me. Fortunately, I find that I really only want to do these simple things, so the program while useful, was overkill both in terms of price and the time that I had to invest in figuring out how to do these simple things. There are less expensive (including the free Picasa) that enable one to do simple things more easily. My advice is to determine if you really need the advanced features that this program contains and are willing to buy a book explaining how to use them. I am rating this as 3 stars because of the lack of any manual, which greatly reduces the utility of the program. Even a brief overview would have been very useful and I think that Adobe should have provided one. From everything that I have read the program is good if you get a manual and need the advanced features. For such a user it would undoubtedly receive a higher rating.