I found out about this program by Googling 'Digital Photo Software' and following various links. I read many reviews and compared features of those programs which were available for trial on the Web. After testing a number of them, I found that this tool is far-and-away the the best available in the $100 price range. Here's why.

Vastly more powerful

No other program that I tried was in the same league as Elements II. The wide array of manipulation that's available blows away all other $100 image editing software that I found. You can do all of the usual stuff like image rotation, cropping, redeye correction, etc. But Elements allows you to perform some pretty fancy digital editing. You can easily correct lighting problems, manipulate contrast and colors, apply filters and special effects, save pictures in various formats and sizes, walk through 'layers', edit out of or add images to a shot, etc.

Useablilty Digital editing software is notoriously difficult to use, but Elements II defies that traditional wisdom. The key word in the above paragraph is 'easily'. All of the features would be useless if you couldn't get to them quickly and intuitively. The UI is full of menus, palettes and tabs that help you quickly find what you're looking for. It's fairly configurable, so you can have as many or as few tools floating around as you like. And, the accompanying help/tutorial is well-done, if a little dry.

One thing I'm not crazy about in the UI is that, when you cancel a filter or effect operation, you're thrown back into the image. It would be more useful if the program left you in the effect or filter tab so you didn't have to reopen it and return to the area that you were experimenting with.

Widely Supported One benefit of using this program is that there is a whole slew of books out on how to use it. I searched Amazon and came up with 145 entries. The one I selected and have used happily is called 'Photoshop Elements 2 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide'. With it, I very quickly got up-to-speed on the basics and was using some of the more advanced features, like using layers, within days.

Some neat features One feature that I use a lot is 'inverse selection'. Say I want to brighten the contrast of everything in a photo except for one particular item - a person's face, for example. With Elements, it's easy to select the face using the selection tool (There some some creative selection tools, as well, which make it easy to select unusual shapes in a photo. ), and then choose 'inverse selection' from the menu. This selects everything that wasn't selected initially. Then I adjust the levels of the selected section and, that's it. The face remains the same and the adjustments are applied to everything else in the photo.

There are dozens of filters and effects that can be combined to give you and infinite number of special effects. You can use a tool that 'liquifies' sections of the picture to slightly alter the look on someone's face. Or the 'artist's brush' tool to make your photo look like a painting. You control how intense these effects are and to what section of the picture they are applied. There are also plenty of levels of undo, in case you don't like what you've done.

Liberating I've found that having this software has allowed me to worry less when taking photos. While there is no substitute for a well-framed, properly lit picture, I know that I can correct a good deal of problems using Elements II. I believe this is software at its best. It has changed the way I use my camera and made using the computer fun again.