For those folks, Adobe offers Photoshop Elements 8, a “consumerized” version of the image manipulation program. Elements comes in at around US$100, more in line with what regular people will pay for a program. And you may be able to find a better deal on it. Amazon sells it for $86.

Elements 8 is freshly minted for the Mac, and is aimed at the amateur photographer who wants to keep track of and play with his or her images. Elements uses the familiar Photoshop interface, with a few tweaks for additional features like the Cookie Cutter Tool. It does, however, by default take over your entire screen, except for the dock. But that’s not something most users will have a problem with. It also adds options for editing your pictures, creating items like photo books and sharing your images by uploading them to web galleries or email attachments.

Elements has all the features you would expect in a consumer-level image editing program including the Spot Healing Brush to fix blotches and torn spots in old images; and the straighten tool for photographers with legs of different lengths.

Probably the most useful features of Elements is found in the Enhance menu. You can let the program automatically adjust for red eye, a feature called Smart Fix, and other adjustments like levels and color correction. And these features work pretty well. If you are used to adjusting your own images in Photoshop, it will still take you a while to get used to the auto adjustment, and you can still tweak those adjustments yourself if you feel the need. You can even convert your images to black and white, change the format of the image to what you want. For you print folks out there, CMYK still not supported.

There’s a handy Quick Edit feature that shows you your image and a panel of the program’s editing features displayed as slider bars so you can adjust and see exactly what you’ve done without opening and closing a bunch of windows. Add to that a Guided Edit feature that walks you through the process and you have a process that anyone can use to make pictures better.

But enough of the practical. Let’s talk about fun features in Elements is the Effects panel. The Filter Gallery is where you can apply fun filters (and practical ones if you like) to your images. Really fun to play with, as is the Cookie Cutter feature, which you can cut out part of the image, leaving, for example, a baseball player in a star shape. You can have a lot of fun with these two features alone.

The Good

Lots of fun features. Familiar Photoshop interface. Walk-though guides for adjusting images.

The Bad

My pet peeve is Mac software that doesn’t look like Mac software. This doesn’t look like Mac software, but that shouldn't stop you from using it.

The Ugly

Nothing to see here.

Macsimum Rating: 8 out of 10