I am currently in the process of scanning thousands of negs and prints into my image library. All of them need post scan processing to rotate, crop, clean dust and blemishes, fix levels and colour, and some require edits to remove unwanted people and objects.
I have just upgraded from PSE11 to 15 (after discussion with an Elements guru who said there were useful features in 15 for my use case).
And indeed, there are. I don't how many of these are new to 15 but my favourites are:
1. Guided > Special Edits > Restore Old Photo
Brings most of the tools I need together in one place.
But it could do with some more changes to create a first class workflow:
- The ability to remove tools that you don't use and add in ones you do. e.g. I have no use for the dust remover tool but I do want the rotate and undo/redo toosl (I know they're there, bottom left of the screen but on my huge screen that's a long way to go)
- Option to suppress the tagline that goes with each tool so that more tools can be seen in the viewable area
- I'd like to bring the items shown at A in the screenshot onto the first panel so that all the tools I use all time are in one panel.
- I would like to add a button (to the front panel) that Saves the current file, closes it and then goes to the next file that is in the Photo Bin, exiting the guided edit only if there are no more in the bin. Currently you have to save the file, close it and keep re-selecting Special Edit and Restore old photo which adds unnecessary clicks
- The options at B, stay on the second panel.
- Why is there no option to Continue Editing in Guided? I frequently have to flip between different guided options and it's clunky.
- I'd like to be able to reposition the items on the panel to suit my workflow (and have those settings remembered between sessions), and I want to put some editing options below the save buttons, tools that I use less frequently.
2. Content aware fill
It's let down by the quick selection tools inaccuracy around the fringes.
3. Polygonal selection tool
It's too easy to lose a selection-in-progress. Needs an autosave.
And I have a question for the forum members. If you make a mistake when selecting points, how do you backup a step? I haven't found a way to do it and I'm wary of losing my entire selection. (I found the answer - pressing the delete key n times deletes the last n steps. But why not use Undo for goodness sakes?)
And it would be nice if it had a semi-automated mode. For example, is I start to mark out a curved division between two objects of different tones, it would be good if, once I had started to do so, it plotted points ahead of me until it could go no further. Then I could click anywhere along the pre-plotted line to accept it up to that point and take over manually until we get to the next tonal division
4. Dust Remover Tool
It's amazing to see all the spots and blemishes disappear with a single button press BUT it's unusable for me because it softens the entire image
5. Spot Healing Brush
It's much more context sensitive than it used to be and makes a much better job of fixing damaged areas, especially at the join between contrasting tones.
Overall I find the step up from PSE11 to 15 a worthwhile upgrade
- Paul
Message was edited by: Paul Barrett: Typo
Message was edited by: Paul Barrett: Question answered - see text in red
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