With an impressive collection of flexible tools, Adobe Photoshop Elements is one of the most powerful consumer-level photo editors around. Batch processing, image layering, cloning, and Web optimization are just a few of the software's time-saving tools.
It's taken a while for Elements to crawl out from the shadow of its celebrity sibling, Photoshop, but these days you'd be hard-pressed to find similarities between the two. There's the occasional familiar dialog box and a handful of traditional Photoshop interface quirks that may elude newbies, but if Photoshop CS is the "pro" version, Elements is for the average consumer.