As you would expect from a bundled package, the interface shares a look and colour scheme with the new Photoshop Elements and the two packages interact with each other in an easy unobtrusive fashion.

The interface is helpful and intuitive and, while I raise a mildly incredulous eyebrow at Adobe’s claim that a novice could be cranking out movies in less than 15 minutes, it is almost instantly obvious what you are looking at and the steps you need to take to achieve your ends. The only place where that is not the case is importing new clips into an existing project. But even this, while initially sending me on a lip chewing click-fest, still passed the no-manual, dive-straight-in acid test.

The feature list and output options remain rich and once again, there are added touches that are excellent. One such addition is the Beat Detect feature which aids in the creation of music videos or the like by analysing your music track and then inserting markers at key peaks in the rhythm. These markers allow you to accurately place cuts in your video, shaving huge amounts of time that you would normally spend in other applications scrubbing the timeline to find the sweet spots. As with the Photoshop Elements, Adobe have really done their homework in deciding what stays and what goes in this package and the end result feels comfortable without being dumb.

Your masterpiece can then be styled to perfection with the addition of pre-fabricated, themes, which include matching opening titles, end credits, filters and DVD menus. Effects, such as distortion, ripples, and blurs can be applied by simple drag and drop operations and there is no wait (on a decent machine) for rendering during editing – grab your desired effect, drop it onto your clip and hey presto, it’s done. From there your end results can be output to a wide variety of formats including Blu-Ray, and even directly published to youTube from within the program itself.

All in all, Adobe have pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of making video editing quick, easy and fun, and as a bundle with Photoshop Elements 6 this is not only a chance to put some remarkably powerful software in your creative arsenal, but also a bargain that’s too good to miss.

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That’s not to say that the interface isn’t initially user friendly – novices are greeted with a Getting Started dialogue which guides you step by step through various common tasks such as PDF creation, document merging, exporting, etc..

Stray away from your trusty guide though, and you’re into a haunted quagmire of toolbars, palettes and icons. Thousands of them. With even more waiting just a click or two in any direction. I’ve never seen such a mind-numbing array of buttons. Obviously you don’t have to have them all on screen at once, but what you do have to do is remember where on earth they all are, since Adobe have, rather bafflingly, neglected to include the option to save your workspace. This feature, which is available in Adobe’s other flagship applications, has never been so needed as it is here. Or isn’t here, as the case may be.

Unfortunately, Adobe’s constant to drive cram more into the Acrobat package is probably its biggest drawback. Acrobat Professional 8 lumbers like a walrus, shuddering under the weight of all those esoteric features.

A quick search of the world wide web will turn up many cheap or even free PDF creation applications and plugins, each clocking in from a few hundred kilobytes to a few megabytes. AP8 gobbles up an alarming 1 gigabyte of disk space. That’s right, 1GB! Now that’s all very well since hard drives come big and cheap these days (just like my …snip!) , but the bloat doesn’t stop there. I found it chugged along in fits and starts even on a dual-core machine with 2GB of RAM, although, in fairness, blame should probably be aimed equally at Windows Vista, the Mr Creosote of the operating system world.

In short though, if you’re a graphics repro house then this is probably right up your street, but for the rest of us – and those of us with ordinary machines – you’re probably better off getting a converter application or plugin.

I’m a porky fellow.
I wanted to tell you that straight off the bat.
I like my food cooked with butter and cream. I like my milk full-fat, not skimmed. I leave the rind on my bacon and my needle-eye arteries weep in wretched self-pity every time they hear the clank of the frying pan.
Because of my lifelong adherence to a strict regime of saturates and starchy carbs, when someone puts the word light or, god forbid, lite, immediately before or after a noun, my brain automatically replaces it with tasteless, pointless or impotent, depending on the noun in question.
Following on from that, as a ten year user of the full-fat, virile, roaring pixel-tiger that is Adobe Photoshop, I assumed that the use of the word Elements in its ‘cheaper’, ‘less functional’ sibling was due to the presence of a similar-minded porker in the Adobe marketing team. ‘We’ll call it Adobe Photoshop Elements because if we call it Lite everyone will think it’s a bit crap.”
Happily, having been given the chance to review Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, I can speak from a point of authority when I declare myself to be utterly wrong on almost all counts.
The ‘full’ version of Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool and, by most consumer standards, an incredibly expensive one. Many people are familiar with it and the internet is awash with illegal copies of it. There is a very good reason for this, and I say it without hyperbole: Photoshop has no equal when it comes to professional image editing.
For Josephine Bloggs organising her family snaps however, it is overkill – a shotgun to kill a fly – and the depth and scope of the options within are, in places, so esoteric or convoluted that the average user never has a need to use them nor the knowledge to do so should the need arise.
This is where Adobe Photoshop Elements comes in.

Laptops.  It’s not really that long ago that they were like prize oxen: ridiculously priced, thick, slow and heavy.  For all their vaunted portability, even as recently as four or five years ago most top-end laptops were still cumbersome beasts, with performance generally shamed by their desktop cousins, unless you wanted to spend the equivalent of a small family car.
Many people, myself included, eschewed them as an unnecessary power toy: You had a computer at work, and a computer at home, why have a laptop too? The lesser processor speeds, tiny screens and generally uncomfortable user position made them undesirable to work on and, for the average user, they were simply an incredibly expensive memory stick, with delusions of grandeur.
If you wanted something smaller then you could go for the Notebook option – a fine distinction that generally meant longer battery life, smaller dimensions and lighter weight, while eschewing things like optical drives and providing minuscule keyboards that could only be used by people with hands that resembled Stickle Bricks.
Time marches on though, and in the ICT world time generally sprints.  The laptop of today, therefore, is a thoroughly different experience.  Sure, the general form is the same – integral screen sits on a keyboard with a trackpad/pointing device built in -  but if you could go back five years and drop Sony’s Vaio SZ61VN/X into someone’s lap, it would be like their prize ox had just wandered into the kitchen on its hind legs and poured itself a cup of tea.
With its dual-core processor, wide-screen format, full-size keyboard, wireless networking, bluetooth, built-in video camera and fingerprint security features, the Vaio SZ61VN/X  Ultra-Portable Laptop Notebook (to give it its full name) sounds like a meaty competitor on paper, yet in the flesh the slimline chassis is only a little thicker than the monitor flap on my old Toshiba laptop.  Pick up an A4 slimline ring-binder and you’ll have a good idea of the dimensions of Sony’s beast.  
And beast it is, with that 2.4GHz core2Duo processor backed up with 2GB of DDR2 RAM and hefty 200GB Hard Drive.  It stood up well to the benchmark tests we threw at it, turning in results that left my old 3GHz desktop rig weeping in embarrassment in all areas bar the display tests.  Even here though, the 831MB onboard GeForce 8400M GPU wasn’t totally without bite – while random pixel results were lacklustre, results for floodfills, polygon and shape plotting were all prodigious.
In fact, the display is where the Vaio SZ (I’m sure you can remember the rest of the numbers) both shines and falls down.  It is a perfect example of opposing extremes which act to cancel each other out.  For every flaw there is something excellent, for each excellence there is a gnawing flaw.
Take, for instance the form  of the display itself:– it is thin. Not slimline: Thin.  We’re talking the short side of 4 millimetres thin.  While this lends to the beautiful overall form of the SZ it also makes for a worryingly flexible, almost flimsy-feeling screen, so keep it well clear of the kids.  
The actual display is a pin-sharp and eye-wateringly clear 13.3” widescreen, with a native resolution of 1280×800. Its quick response time means no blur or ghosting even when watching action flicks on the onboard DVD writer, and its huge contrast ratio ensures deep black and bright, bright whites with no bleeding.
Unfortunately though, Sony have coated the entire thing with what must be the most reflective transparent material known to man, and use a back-light that suffers from severe vignetting  when viewed from anywhere other than face on, the net result being a beautifully clear display that is only beautifully clear when from the most perfect of angles.
Still,  this is really the only let down for the Vaio and, while it is a major concern, it is somewhat offset by the performance and rich feature set of the rest of the machine.
Look Mommy, that cow’s moonwalking!

_{Although written by the author of Helluva.co.uk, this review first appeared in ICT for Education magazine from Lima Publishing, and is reproduced with their kind permission.}