When Photoshop Elements was first released back in 2001, it became a runaway success. It’s easy to see why: Elements gives people all the tools they need to get the very best from their photographs. It lets you take a ho-hum shot and give it some wow. If you run a graphics studio or a large professional photography business, then you definitely need the full version of Photoshop. But for most people who aren’t creating images for commercial printing, Elements offers a very useful toolkit at an appealing price.

Since 2001, there’s been a new version of the program released almost every year, and each time Adobe has tried to add new features to make the program more valuable. The problem was that just cramming all that extra stuff into the original program eventually started to make things pretty unwieldy, and Elements was already a tad intimidating to real beginners with no background in working with digital images.

So with Elements 11, Adobe introduces a significant re-imagining of the program, designed to make it easier to use. If you’ve used Elements before, you may be taken aback the first time you see the stripped-down design of the new version. Not to worry—all your favorite Editor features are still there, although it may take a little looking around to find them. There are plenty of interesting new features, too. Elements also includes a photo-organizing program (called the Organizer, logically enough), which is where Adobe has made the biggest changes. In fact, the changes to Elements 11 are probably the biggest since the Organizer was first included back in Elements 3. But regardless of whether you’re a complete newbie or have been using Elements for the past decade, this book will quickly get you up to speed on Elements 11.