It can’t be easy for major software companies to keep releases of their flagship products fresh year after year. Case in point: Photoshop Elements 8 ($99.99 direct). Adobe’s super-powerful consumer version of its industry-leading Photoshop has just arrived in another iteration for 2009 that looks and feels pretty much like last year’s version. With a user interface that looks like it’s barely been touched, and packing new features that for the most part are best described as superficial, Photoshop Elements 8 bears the hallmarks of a service-pack release that somehow ended up in a box. Because the software remains remarkable for the breadth and depth of its capabilities, it still earns our Editors’ Choice. But, with one noteworthy exception, it offers few compelling reasons for owners of older versions to upgrade.

The most exciting new addition—if not the only exciting new addition—is the Recompose Photo tool. A distillation of the astonishing content-aware scaling that appeared in Photoshop CS4 Extended, it lets you resize images with respect to their contents, reducing unused or underused space but keeping the most important parts, or remove unwanted elements (such as people) without affecting their surroundings. If it takes a steady hand and some tweaking to get it just right (starting with a high-quality image helps), it’s still an unparalleled—and practically magical—way to tighten up the composition of your images.

Download: PART1, PART 2, PART 3, PART 4, PART 5, PART 6

Password : irfree.com