Yep, just as we finally go to press Adobe have released Photoshop Elements 3! Great timing guys, but also a great new version. So what is different?

In the book we have seperate descriptions of Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Album. With Photoshop Elements 3, the two programs are combined, plus lots of great features have been added.

If you would like to try working through a chapter using Photoshop Elements 3, select the link to Chapter 6 for version 3 on the tab to the left or click here. If you just want more information, read on.

First there is the appearance. The opening screen looks like this:

To go to the image editing program, click on "Edit and enhance photos". This will take you to a more familiar, but much cleaner looking editor.

Along the left side are all the old familiar tools, just as described in the book. The shortcuts are all there too. There are some new tools as well. The cookie cutter tool is really more for fun than for any serious purpose, but the spot healing brush is great for just that - no more acne! It also remove spots and scratched easily, sort of like an automated version of clone stamp.

Photoshop Elements goes much further than before, with enhanced help files and tutorials. Best of all it also organises all your images.

Clicking on the photo browser button will take you to a new area of the program - the organizer.

You will see the familiar appearance of Photoshop Album, with all the tags and category labels as before. There are a few new tricks as well here. Select some images and choose file>attach to email (Ctrl-Shift-E):

and hey presto you have an option to resize and compress all the images to any size you want. Make your selection and click OK and...

...you have an addressed email containing the images, correctly resized and compressed. Now how cool is that!

Now if I go back to the workspace, having made all these images, you will see that they are all visible as thumbnails at the bottom of my workspace, so I can jump back and forth between them easily.

So, if you are nervous about using the book and learning Photoshop Elements 2 and then upgrading to version 3, don't be. The instructions are the same, but the features are even better!