In the past, Explorer almost had a mind of its own about seeking out image files in your computer and organizing them in thumbnail pages.

Now, a user who has individually arranged their way of storing digital photo files, and doesn’t just put them ad hoc into the Windows My Pictures folder, can use Explorer in a personally defined way. Windows Explorer has been improved measurably, having much more of the user control offered in Bridge than past versions of Explorer.

To get the Mac/Windows differences out of the way first, the only big difference between the editions is that the browser for Windows is called Explorer, while the Mac version gets a simpler version of Adobe Bridge, the browser Adobe provides with Photoshop CS4. Yes, a lot of the new and improved features are targeted to the family snapshooter, but is that necessarily disadvantageous to photographers who might be seeking an affordable alternative to Photoshop? Is Elements 8 Photoshop Lite? Or, has Lightroom taken that space in the Adobe image-editing family? What certainly is new in Elements 8 is that the Windows PC and the Apple Mac versions of the software were released at the same time, so this report was done with both versions running on two different computers, more or less synchronically. After installing Elements 8, the first thing I did was put the Adobe supplied press CD in my computer and opened it into Organizer-it’s easy and works very similarly to Bridge.

Adobe photoshop 8.0 mac