Adobe Photoshop is a de facto standard for graphical processing. If you work with web site or any other graphical design. Photoshop is usually a must.

However not everyone can afford it. Adobe charges a lot for its products. Fortunately with Photoshop there is a much cheaper replacement: Adobe Photoshop Elements. It costs nearly $70 instead of $645 for the full Photoshop. Photoshop Elements is intended mainly for Photographers and amateur designers. It lacks many advanced powerful features of its full brother, such as layer sets, curves, etc.

Recently I got a PSD file. It had layer sets. Photoshop Elements cannot open layer sets. It shows them as a single non–editable group (note non–editable pencils on the right):

I searched the web for the way to open the group in the Photoshop Elements or to split the layer set into separate layers. I could find the way to do it but I found a better solution.

I found a plugin for the Photoshop Elements that enables many of the missing features. Since Photoshop and Photoshop Elements share the same code base, functions are there, they simply have no UI. The plugin adds the UI for these features (over 150 total). It costs $12. So for $70+$12 I was able to get more of the functionality of the full Photoshop that costs $645. Some features are available in full, others (like layer set ungrouping) are workarounds. In my case I was able to ungroup grouped layers:

I highly recommend this solution to anyone who cannot afford full Photoshop but have to edit PSD files created by Adobe's editor.