PhotoShop Elements
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Updated: 7 May 2001 at 4:00 GMT,
by James Rigg
[Panoguide]
This is a review of version 1.0
PhotoShop Elements is a "light" version of one of Adobe's best known products: Adobe PhotoShop. Elements replaces the older PhotoShop LE which was just like PhotoShop but with certain bits of functionality taken out: Elements also lacks some of the more advanced features of the full PhotoShop, but Adobe added other features, including "photo merge" for creating panoramas. Aside from photo merge most of the additional functionality makes PhotoShop easier to use: a context sensitive help tool; the automate option allows you to batch convert images from one file format to another, resize, etc. One of the major limitations of LE has gone - the history functionality (multiple levels of undo) is now in Elements (there was only one level of undo in LE).
Image stitching, or "photo merge" as Adobe have called it, appears to simply be a set of PhotoShop macros that flattens a set of images into a single canvas and then merge them together. Photo merge is intended to be used to create normal panoramic pictures and not full 360 degree pictures. The stitching is achieved by simply aligning and blending - no image warping or lens compensation is performed, so only quite long lenses will perform well (e.g. more than 35mm).
Without the ability to warp lenses appropriately I found that Elements was incapable of stitching my images satisfactorily - even with 35mm sequences I found it poor. It is possible to get round this limitation very easily by installing Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools plugin for Adobe PhotoShop and then use that to warp the images before you use Photo merge. Unfortunately this means you have to do the hard work of editing each image first... and unfortunately again, I have tried this with an 18mm sequence and Photo merge got completely confused and made a real mess of what should be a simple stitch of 12 images.
For simple sets of a few pictures shot with quite long lenses (35mm or longer), I think the Photo merge feature is a nice little extra in what is an extremely good digital photo manipulation package. But if you are really interested in panoramic photography (even if you are not interested in 360 degrees or websites), I think you will need something other than Elements. Having said that if you are a wannabe panoramic photographer and you don't have Adobe PhotoShop and you are looking for a cheap alternative, this is it.