
Personally, I find editing tools in Photoshop Elements easier to use than GIMP, but that’s just because of my familiarity with Adobe software development. The Crop tool handles use a better design in GIMP than in Photoshop Elements, but PE’s Clone tool has a few tricks up its sleeve that GIMP’s Clone tool doesn’t, and so on. There are small trade-offs when it comes to each tool, but the final result comes out more or less balanced. Your basic image editing tools are obviously the most important feature of your image editor since they’re the whole reason we’re here at all! Fortunately, this is a pretty easy one to compare, since they’re more or less equal in terms of capability and ease of use. To give GIMP and Photoshop Elements a fair comparison, let’s take a closer look at some of the most important features of these two popular image editors: GIMP vs Photoshop Elements: Which Wins Where? GIMP vs Photoshop Elements: Which Wins Where?.Then once you're ready to make the move, the Expert Mode gives you full access to all the wonderful tools, filters, layer styles, blend modes, and other features that Elements offers. It's a useful learning device that will help beginners to get to grips with Photoshop fundamentals like layers and masks. For example, if you use a guided edit to add a zoom burst effect and then switch to the Expert mode, you can peek under the hood of the guided edit to see how the effect takes shape on different layers. One of the clever things about the three editing modes is that you can switch between them as you go. The other new guided edit is for adding motion blur to suggest subject movement, which, although fun, is more of a gimmick. This may not be offering anything new in terms of tools, but it's an astute feature that helpfully guides beginners through a perplexing process. The first addresses one of the most frequent questions posed by beginners – How do I resize my photo for web/print? The solution is a step by step tutorial with quick access to all the relevant tools. The interface has been improved in Elements 14, with interactive sliders that show before/after images for each effect.

For those who want to take their image-editing further, the Guided mode offers 40 step-by-step guides for tasks like creating composites, spot color effects and restoring old photos.
