26 MACWORLD MARCH 2020
MACUSER REVIEW: ADOBE PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 2020IMAGE SENSEI
Adobe Photoshop
Elements 2020 (go.
macworld.com/adel)
marks the sixteenth
Mac release
(technically 18.0,
versions five and
seven were Windows-
only) of the annual
consumer-focused
edition, stripping away
most of the
complexity in favor of
a hand-holding approach to image
manipulation. If you’ve been vexed trying
to perform relatively simple tasks in
Photoshop, then Elements is for you.
This year, Adobe infused PE2020 with
more of the secret sauce baked into big
brother Photoshop recently—namely
Adobe Sensei, the company’s artificial
intelligence and machine
learning technology. Sensei
enables some pretty incredible
features that just a few years
ago would have required a lot
of time, effort, and skill with the
full version.
One such feature allows
users to automatically select
subjects in an image. This
comes in handy for replacing
backgrounds or extracting
objects from one photo to composite into
another. What once required tediously
drawing around the edge of a subject or
repeatedly mashing Quick Selection or
Magic Wand tools has now been (mostly)
reduced to a single mouse click thanks to
the Select → Subject menu option.
The results aren’t always perfect andOne-click automatic selection of foreground subjects is a powerful
addition to this year’s Photoshop Elements.Use the Pattern Brush option to decorate photos without
affecting foreground subjects.