A Toronto Photography Blog.

A great last minute gift suggestion for the photographer in your life would be Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. Elements is the stripped down and much, much (much) cheaper version of the full Photoshop suite. It's always been more than enough of an editing platform for most folks however one drawback was the lack of layers. Just do a little searching and you'll see that having a layer function allows you to do about a billion things that would be otherwise impossible.

Only this week did it come to my attention that the latest version of Elements has finally incorporated layers. This is a big deal. I'm guessing Adobe is feeling pressure from free editing programs like Picassa and Aviary, so they've not only added functionality they've dropped the price. Elements 9 can be nabbed for about one-tenth the cost of the full Photoshop, and even for many pros it would likely provide all the editing potential required. Another advantage I can see is that Photoshop is a notorious RAM hog and the Elements version probably runs considerably faster on most computers.

Go. Buy. Help stimulate the economy.