The editing features in Photoshop^R Elements, which are based on Photoshop's industry-leading technology, have been around for several versions but Adobe^R still found a way to add a few new features and improve some old ones for this upgrade to Photoshop Elements 7.

When you open the Edit workspace, you are given several options for how you wish to use the Editing features, based on how much help you want from Photoshop Elements. With the Full mode, you get the Effects, Layers and full Tools palettes, with all the tools that you will need to do custom editing or to create your own graphics from scratch.

The Quick mode has the one-step and auto fixes for those simple photo fixes. This workspace has a simple layout and gives you only a few tools in the Tools palette, along with several quick-fix palettes. The General Fixes palette includes auto fixes such as Smart and Red Eye Fixes. Other palettes include Lighting, Color, Sharpen and Touch Up. On these palettes are auto fix buttons as well as slider controls for fine tuning. The Touch Up palette has Smart Brushes for Red Eye Removal, Pearly Whites, Blue Skies and the High Contrast Red Filter. One nice thing was the little light bulb icons on each palette that send you directly to the corresponding help section in the online documentation.

The Guided Edit mode gives you the most help with its built-in descriptions and step-by-step instructions for each task. This is especially nice for the more complex processes such as using levels and histograms. It also tells you when you make a mistake and how to get back on track. You have guided help for everything from basic cropping and straightening to using some of the more complex features such as the Surface Blur filter, Automatic Actions and working with camera raw files.

Within these three editing workspaces, you have both before and after previews as you work on your fixes and you will also find some nice new tools. The new Smart Brush that we mentioned above is so easy to use. It comes with over fifty special effects including the new Pearly Whites (for whitening teeth) and Blue Skies (for enhancing skies). With the Smart Brush, which works like a simple brush, you will be able to select an area of your photo and apply special effects in one easy step. The new Photomerge^R Scene Cleaner is an amazing tool. With this tool, you can remove unwanted items from your photos as you also merge multiple photos together to create one perfect scene. Or you can go the other way and select elements from several photos and combine them into one. The new Photomerge Group Shot tool is similar in that it helps you merge several shots of a group of people into one perfect group shot. Just decide which version of each person should be taken from the sample photos and merge them into the final group shot. Besides the many special effects filters and tools, you have other creative options in the Full Edit mode including old favorites such as the Cookie Cutter, Type and Custom Shapes tools.

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