You just got back from the family reunion and are confident you got the perfect portrait of the whole clan — after all, you did make all the kids and grandparents stand still while you snapped ten identical pics just to be sure. Sadly, when you upload the photos and see them on your computer’s big screen, there isn’t a single one in which somebody isn’t blinking, frowning, or (in the case of your nephew) sticking his tongue out. Enter the new version of Adobe Photoshop Elements, available at around $80 for either Windows or Mac: This friendly little application boasts a raved-about feature that makes it super-simple to craft one perfect picture out of many shots with minor flaws — just steal a smile from shot #4, a wave from shot #7, and blend them into your base shot using Photomerge, and you have something worth putting in this year’s holiday card. Which, incidentally, Elements can help you assemble, with an array of pre-designed layouts for scrapbook pages, slideshows and any number of other display options. As you’d expect from any program with “Photoshop” in its name, this one knows a thing or two about the technical details — color balance, contrast, et cetera — that make one pic pop out and another look drab. Fortunately for those of us who aren’t tech-minded, the programmers have harnessed Photoshop’s industry-standard tools into a format that’s novice-friendly: click here to tone down the red-eye, click there to make the colors more vibrant, and so on. Elements won’t turn a sloppy snapshot into an Ansel Adams, but it can help a curious amateur assemble a family photo album that looks better than most.