You Don't Have To Go To Design School To Love Adobe... {A Giveaway!} | the pixel boutique

UPDATE: The winner of this giveaway is #321, Tanya!

After several thousand dollars, copious amounts of hours, and many many many design comps, I graduated from design school (…more years ago than I care to admit).

From that point on, Adobe has been a household name for me. I use one program or another in the Adobe suite every. single. day.

I’ve said it before…if you are a blogger, scrapbooker, amateur photographer or do anything with photos (hello?…who else does that leave?), you owe it to yourself to purchase and learn Photoshop Elements. And of course, you can always check back here for various Elements video tutorials.

The people at Adobe have figured out a way to maintain the power of Photoshop while automating and simplifying many popular function for editing photos.

The latest version of Photoshop Elements is version 8. And it is jammed pack with coolness.

For instance, along with the Red Eye tool that automatically removes red eye from your subject, you can now brush their teeth with the Toothbrush tool. You can automatically brighten and whiten teeth with a swipe of the paintbrush. You can also treat your subject to an instant tan and add a touch of lipstick in the same manner.

For your landscape photos, quickly and easily make the blue sky bluer, the water clearer and even add a sunset to any sky. (I told you. Cool, no?)

What I love about these functions is that they make “smart” edits. Rather than changing the original image, they do it the right way…(the way I paid thousands of dollars to learn how to do…). Elements creates a new adjustment layer and mask to create the desired effect. It can be deleted, adjusted, turned on or off. Ingenious.

Photoshop Elements assists you with just about anything you want to do with a photo. If you want to make some simple touch ups, crop a photo or create a whole new project, Elements gives you step by step instructions.

For some added cool, there are tools like PhotoMerge that allow you to take multiple photos of the same scene and blend them to create the perfect image. So, you know those 17 Christmas pictures you just took, where no one was looking at the camera and smiling at the same time? With the stroke of a brush, you can merge photos together to create the near perfect holiday picture (I say “near” because this function works, given that you have two photos that are very similar in composition.) You can also do things like create seamless panorama photos with the Panorama tool and create beautiful black and whites.

There are so many more great features in Photoshop Elements 8…I’m only scratching the surface in this review. You can find out a lot more here. Currently, Elements is priced at $79 for Windows/$69 for Mac and Adobe is offering free ground shipping through December 21. What a steal!

WIN IT! Adobe has generously offered one Pixel Boutique reader a free version of Photoshop Elements 8 (for Windows or Mac) just in time for the holidays!

To enter, comment on this post with how you would use Photoshop Elements the most…printing out family photos? Scrapbooking? Blogging? All of the above?
For extra entries, tweet about this giveaway up to once a day and/or subscribe to this blog.
Entries must be made by Tuesday, December 22 at 11:59 p.m. MST.

(Because the giveaway will end so close to Christmas, the program will be shipped after Christmas. If this is a gift, check back on Dec. 23 as the winner will be announced by then!)