The program’s main advantage is that it’s cheaper than Photoshop and Lightroom, but remains powerful enough for most photo retouching tasks. Thus, the improved raw workflow is quite welcome–improved, in that you can bypass it entirely if you want. For example, to create a slide show of NEF (Nikon raw) files, it simply applies the default raw-processing settings and treats them like JPEGs.

Also quite useful is the new text search box in the organizer, which is a fast, easy way to filter by keywords or basic metadata. Very basic metadata; you can only search on time, data, camera, and caption text. But that should be sufficient for this class of user.

Obviously there is always one new and incredible feature per version; Elements 7 is no different and has the Photomerge Scene Cleaner which is an extension of Group Shot. It allows you to seamlessly combine variations of a photo to eliminate unwanted objects in the scene. Typically features like these never work for me without a great bit of work on my end; amazingly enough this one did, on two random photos (which met the similarity criteria). I haven’t tried the other variations, Photomerge Faces, or Panorama–but those are derivative of existing Photoshop CS3 tools.

Adobe has also updated adjustment operations through the use of Smart Brushes, which consolidate multi-operation adjustments, such as selecting then creating a new effects layer, into a single selection operation that automatically generates the layer and mask.