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Photoshop Elements 15 (Mac)
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As smartphone cameras advance, offering features that rival and sometimes exceed the point-and-shoots of old, hobbyist interest in photography has surged, not only for documenting friends and family, but for recording a critical world view—similar to classic street or landscape photography. When Apple posts billboards of scenes shot by amateurs and pros using their iPhone, it’s not hard to see where the inspiration comes from.
For those who want more visual tricks than Apple Photos offers (especially for composition and special effects) they turn to Adobe Photoshop Elements, an app designed for consumers who seek an easy way to achieve sophisticated special effects. Elements, now in its 15th iteration, is no Photoshop, but a good number of its advanced features are derived from the company’s flagship app and namesake.
Adobe is wise enough not to mess too much with the basic formula and general interface of this app, preferring to enhance and add to its features. With version 15, the updated Organizer companion rocks brand new search capabilities and batch processing, while a new crop of guided edits refresh the main editing package.
Adobe Elements 15 Organizer
The Adobe Elements Organizer, an analog to Photoshop’s Bridge, acts like a mini digital asset management system, keeping track of all photos and videos to make them accessible to the two main Elements apps, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Aside from import/export and organizational functions like ratings and tags, the Organizer features face recognition, geo-tagging, and built-in maps. The Organizer is also the place for basic fixes like rotation and auto-correction. In version 15, it does a lot more.
The Organizer now has more intelligent capabilities, like its new Smart Tags feature. From the search interface you can see exactly what tags the app has placed on your images. Google Photos, Flickr, and Apple Photos already use artificial intelligence to automatically determine content for tagging photos. Adobe says that deep learning algorithms were used to develop the Smart Tags feature, but that there is no on-going AI technology running in the Organizer.
You can use the app’s enhanced search functionality to quickly scroll by Smart Tags, People, Places, Date, Folders, Keywords, Albums, Ratings and Media Types, whose icons run down the left side of the window. You can choose from the icon or just type in search criteria in the box at the top of the window.
You can use the And or Or command to narrow down your search from thousands of images, video, audio, and projects to find the item you want. Note that each smart tag search builds on the previous one, so make sure the text box at the top reflects only your current search.
The Organizer’s new Instant Fix update now lets you batch correct photos imported into the app. Just group together your chosen shots, and the new interface offers a set of adjustable sliders to fix them all simultaneously for clarity, color, light, brand new special effects, and more.
Photoshop Elements Editor
Adobe’s famous Quick, Guided, and Expert editing modules lie at the heart of the Photoshop Elements Editor, making it the go-to app for amateurs seeking a more sophisticated but accessible alternative to Apple Photos. This new version debuts five new guided edits to perform complex tasks via step-by-step instructions. In this version, however some were better than others.
Picture text
While it can be a fairly straightforward task to accomplish that beloved classical postcard effect of filling in lettering with a landscape or other images, you need the proper tools and know-how. Elements’ new Photo Text guided edit makes it drop dead simple to achieve. The feature lets you choose from the fonts within your system and even lets you add an embossed look and drop shadows for a pro finish.
Just choose the Type tool and start typing. You can select and cycle through all the selections to help you decide. After you choose your font, you can enlarge, fit, and apply some simple effects. Occasionally, this feature had glitchy performance; I’d choose a font and start typing without it registering any letters on the canvas. In that case, I cancelled and started over to achieve the advertised results.
Art transformation
Creating art from photos is swiftly becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Photoshop Elements’ new Painterly module offers a nod to that by letting you add a canvas background or watercolor brush strokes to your photos. There are only five brush styles, but you can change their size and background color to alter the look. The module is aided by a minimal number of textures and effects.
I found this effect a little half-baked. It’s understandable that Adobe wants to keep the tool simple, but in the future, I’d like to see more enhancements with additional brush shapes and textures as well as better ways to blend them.
Multiple effects
The new Effects Collage guided edit allows you to construct an artistic presentation by carving up a single photo into several sectors, automatically adding a different special effect to each one. It’s an intriguing idea, but not every photo will lend itself to the limited number of effects combinations offered.
It would be nice if you could adjust the borders yourself, though there were quite a number of selections to choose from in each preset. It would be great choose which effects go where rather than just having to use the built-in template. But that’s a minor quibble with this cool feature, which dresses up mundane pictures in a pleasing way.
I also noted that this feature caused the fans on my Mac to whir, and that the application of the effects was not instantaneous.
Camera, action
Say you don’t know how or were unable to catch a cool motion shot? Or maybe the scene should have had more action than it really did? The new Speed Pan guided edit adds a motion blur behind your subject to create a feeling of movement. Just select the subject and let the software do the rest.
Original frames
Photoshop Elements always shipped with many assets, including picture frames for scrapbookers and blog posters. Version 15 gives you Frame Creator, a new way to create your own custom frames instead of having to choose the app’s pre-made ones. The idea is to give users headroom to expand the capabilities of the software without having to use the built-in artwork. These new frames can be saved in the app’s frame format and used with any photo, plus you can share them with friends.
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I found this to be one of the least intuitive guided edits. Despite the instructions accompanying each frame tool, the outcome was hard to visualize and involved too much experimentation for a reasonably quick result. It would have been easier had Adobe included some shapes in this module with ways to tweak the edges instead of depending on user sleight of hand.
Attitude adjustment
Photoshop Elements’ new Adjust Facial Features tech first originated in Photoshop Fix, and then migrated to Photoshop CC as the Face Aware Liquefy feature. Making faces look friendlier has come into vogue for everything from social media portraits to group shots and selfies. While I’m not a huge fan of enhancing people’s faces, some photos do benefit from that slight transformation of a neutral expression into a smile. But that’s not all you can do.
You may want to correct a squint that goes with that frown, or otherwise make slight cosmetic changes to lips, nose, and even the shape of the face. But don’t go crazy, because applying these effects can distort the natural looks of your subject.
While the defining blue circle does not move and you can’t resize it—and on at least one image I tried—it cut right in the middle of the face, enlarging the image helps to rectify that issue. Also it would be helpful if each eye could be adjusted separately, as squints (and faces) are not necessarily symmetrical.
Better filtering
Filters are a great way to try on new looks for special or not-so-hot photos, and an updated Filter Gallery not only lets you choose a cool filter but also fine-tune the details. You can easily try out each filter by clicking it, where it will apply directly onto the open photo, and then use individual controls to tweak. While the main filter was applied in real time, the advanced filter sometimes appeared in a small preview box that was harder to see.
Bottom line
Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 is a mature product that gets new and enhanced features on a yearly basis while keeping an elaborate and engaging interface consistent and easy to use. If you are a photo enthusiast who seeks special effects goodness without the learning curve, Photoshop Elements is the ticket. While I found at least two of the new guided edits less than compelling, improvements to the Organizer were uniformly useful.
For the very most part, Photoshop Elements 15 performed well without lag time on most operations, but occasionally I encountered glitches or intermittent buggy behavior. Adobe says that it recommends Elements for macOS Sierra, and despite a crash here and there, the app functioned as expected.
You can purchase Photoshop Elements together with its video-editing companion, Premiere Elements, for $150 (Adobe online store link), or buy it alone for $100 (Adobe online store link). A free 30-day trial version is available. If you have version 14, and the new guided edits are not compelling for you, it would be an easy call to wait it out until next year to pay for an update. The upgrade policy is always the same: Any user with a previous version can upgrade for $80, or $120 for the bundle. If the new guided edits are something you will use frequently, or you have not upgraded for several iterations, you will be happy enough with the new version to lay down some cash.
Photoshop Elements 15 (Mac)
Learn moreIf you are a photo enthusiast who seeks special effects goodness without the learning curve, Photoshop Elements is the ticket.Pros
- Easy to use
- Tons of sophisticated editing tools and effects without the learning curve
- Organizer’s AI assisted search and tagging features come in handy
Cons
- Facial feature enhancement seemed rudimentary
- Photo text feature was sometimes buggy
- Some guided edits were less impressive, harder to use, or lacked choices
$99.99
- ProsClear, simple interface. Guided Edits ease basic and advanced projects. Lots of video effects. Solid text tools. Powerful Audio editing. Good control over stabilization. 4K support.
- ConsNo 360-degree VR or 3D editing. No multicam feature or screen recording capability. Slow rendering speeds. No HEVC support in Windows.
- Bottom LineAdobe's consumer video editing app adds a new start page, Auto Creations, a redesigned quick-editing interface, and faster performance.
Adobe's enthusiast-level video editing software is a very user-friendly, capable product, with lots of tools that help you produce compelling movies from your video clips. For the 2019 update, we get a new start window, a helpfully redesigned easy-editing interface, and automatically generated creations such as collages and slideshows. Despite its simplicity and appealing features, Premiere Elements falls a bit short of Editors' Choices CyberLink PowerDirector and Corel VideoStudio when it comes to rendering speed and support for new video technologies like 360-degree VR content.
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Compatibility, Pricing, Setup
Premiere Elements is available for Windows 7 SP1 and later and macOS 10.12 and later. I primarily review the Windows version here, though I did install and run the software on an iMac as well. You can get the program together with Photoshop Elements for $149.99 or as a standalone app for $99.99. These are one-time fees—no subscription needed. Note that Premiere Elements is not a part of Adobe's Creative Cloud service. If you're upgrading from a previous version, those prices drop to $119.99 and $79.99, respectively. A free trial gets you 30 days of full-featured program use, but any videos made with the trial get stamped with a watermark.
Make sure you have a fast Internet connection and a capacious hard drive before installing the program, as it takes up more than 2GB of disk space. You also need a reasonably powerful machine with a multicore CPU of at least 2GHz, and at the very least 4GB of RAM and 5GB of available hard drive space. On Windows, the app requires SSE2 support on the CPU and a DirectX 9 or 10 graphics card with at least a 1280-by-800 resolution monitor. When you first launch the program, it asks if you want to send diagnostic information to Adobe.
What's New in Premiere Elements
For longtime Premiere Elements users, here's a quick rundown of what's new. It's less impressive a list of changes than what we saw in this year's release of Photoshop Elements, which added futuristic automatic curation to find your best photos—that feature doesn't apply to video content.
A New Home Window. See feature tips, launch the programs, access help, and see Auto Creations from this startup window.
Auto Creations. Like Apple Photos, Google Photos, and Windows Photos, Elements now automatically generates slideshows and photo collages from your media. The Adobe version makes use of the company's Sensei AI technology.
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Increased Speed. Adobe has sped up installation as well as common tasks.
Support for HEVC and HEIC on macOS. Now that Apple's iPhone can take advantage of these far more efficient video and image codecs, it makes sense that Adobe would finally add support. Unfortunately, the support isn't yet available in the Windows version, though an Adobe contact informs me that the company is working on it.
New Guided Edits. Debuting in the 2019 version of Premiere Elements are the Glass Pane effect and the Luma Fade transition. The first makes your subject appear to be behind glass, and the second fades colors in gradually. The previous 2018 update added several strong new features, including Candid Moments, which picks the best still images from your video clips; Smart Trim, which cuts out boring video sections; freeze frame with motion titles; a Bounce Back effect; Fix Action Cam Footage; Animated Social Post; and Animated GIF Export.
Interface and Organizer
New for the 2019 version of Elements is the home screen, from which you can launch any of the three Elements apps—Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements, or Organizer—and also see help links, Auto Creations, tips on using features, and recent projects. This window replaces the eLive tab's functions, which offered the same content.
The separate Organizer window is where you import, rate, keyword tag, and share media online. It's also where you output your work to DVDs and other project formats. Mode options appear right at the top of the Organizer, including Media, People, Places, and Events. The last three give you helpful ways of viewing your media. The Organizer is somewhat skewed toward photos—its Instant Fix button only works for photos, as does the Places view. It has, however, been much simplified and improved over the years.
![Adobe Adobe](/uploads/1/2/6/1/126107592/169585965.png)
The Organizer shows off its chops when you tap the Search magnifying glass icon in the top window border. A set of buttons appears along the left edge, letting you filter your search by automatic AI-generated Smart Tags, People, Places, Dates, Keywords, Albums, Folders, Media Types, and Star Ratings. You can combine search types, looking up, for example, pictures of Jordan Minor taken in New York City in September. Unfortunately, the Smart Tags didn't find my video content, even when I had a video nearly identical to a photo of the same subject it did find.
Touch screens on PCs are increasingly common, and they get excellent support in the recent versions of Windows. I'm happy to see Adobe also putting in the effort to support this input option, at least in the Organizer and in Premiere Element's Quick mode. That said, the support could be better. You can scrub through video and add and split clips, but some controls are still on the small side for pudgy-finger manipulation. There's no touch-specific interface option like that in Photoshop CC.
Premiere Elements' video editing interface remains largely the same in the latest version, with the standard timeline across the bottom and preview and content panels sharing the top half of its window. I like that the content panel collapses when you're not using it, for a bigger view of the video window. The editing interface now has three mode tabs: Quick, Guided, and Expert.
As with most consumer video editing software, the program creates a lower-resolution proxy version of your clips for immediate quick performance. You can hit the Render button at any time to see the full-resolution movie, but this can take many minutes, depending on your video length and resolution. You can't render just one clip or section, just the whole movie. A line above the timeline shows which clips are rendered—green for done, and yellow for not ready. Even using lower-resolution previews, however, I still experienced video stutter when working with multiple overlay tracks.
You can capture and import video and photos from within the editor as well as from the Organizer. The Editor's Add Media button offers choices to get media from the Organizer (which opens a preview panel), from files and folders, or directly from cameras and devices. Elements supports 4K content, so owners of a GoPro Hero4 or an iPhone 6S or newer can work with their cameras' top resolutions. Premiere Elements doesn't, however, support the H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding format on Windows, nor does it support 3D or 360-degree VR clips. Competitors such as Magix Movie Edit Pro, Vegas Movie Studio, and PowerDirector have long supported these formats.
Premiere Elements also lacks screen-cam recording, which lets you create videos of desktop activity on your computer screen, a feature offered by Corel VideoStudio Pro and PowerDirector. And there's no multicam editing feature, which lets you sync the same scene shot with different cameras at different angles, as found in PowerDirector and Magix Movie Edit Pro. Mac users get strong multicam editing in Final Cut Pro X, our Editors' Choice for video editing on the Mac.
The Project Assets panel helpfully drops down to show thumbnails of all your clips, audio, and image files. This resembles the way pro software uses bins to keep track of assets. There's also a helpful History window, which lets you see what your project looked like at any point during your previous edits. You can also search within the transition and effect selection boxes, which I find helpful.
One thing I miss on the Expert mode's timeline is the ability to quickly solo a track, hiding all the others, though you can hide either a video or audio track by clicking on the film or speaker icons at the head of the timeline. Also missing is the ability to zoom the timeline in and out with the mouse wheel, which most competitors offer. You can't pop out panels into their own separate windows as you can in Vegas Movie Studio, but you can use a dual-monitor setup.
Quick Mode Edits Your Clips for You
Quick mode has been updated for the 2019 version of Elements, offering a clear, simple way to join video clips, add titles, transitions, image correction, soundtracks, and effects—all without requiring you to work in a labyrinth of tracks and controls. It uses an iMovie-like storyboard view of clips and is one of the cleanest views you'll see anywhere. A clear scrubber lets you move through your movie, and you can easily apply freeze-frames and rotation using buttons. Smart Trim and speed-altering are within easy access from each clip thumbnail. Another button lets you add music, with options to fade in and out.
Basic Video Editing in Adobe Premiere Elements
Premiere Element's Smart Trim identifies poor-quality sections of your media and can delete them all at once. Style choices—People, Action, and Mix—affect what sections of the clips are retained. It automatically chose Action for my bike-stunt test video, and trim suggestions appeared with no waiting required. You can preview the suggested trims, and it did a good job of selecting the most active scenes, though one short section was dull, and some further-away bike tricks weren't included. It also removed out-of-focus and shaky sections, which is helpful. Handles let you easily extend its selections, and you can simply hit the Delete key to remove one. If you have long footage of limited interest, Smart Trim is a helpful tool.
Premiere Elements lets you apply video stabilization from either Quick or Expert mode by choosing Shake Stabilizer from the Adjust panel. There are two methods of stabilization accessible from buttons—Quick and Detailed. Quick isn't actually that quick: My 1:35-minute clip took about 10 minutes to stabilize in Quick mode. At least Premiere Elements shows you the progress—minutes left, percent done, and current frame.
After that, a banner message says, 'To avoid extreme cropping, set Framing to Stabilize Only or adjust other parameters.' In my testing, this meant going into the Detailed panel, and then choosing Advanced, where I had a lot of choices, such as smoothness, crop percent, and edge feather. It's a powerful tool, but you'll need patience for long clips. Large bumps aren't always fixed, even with Smoothness set to 100 percent. One cool choice is Synthesize Edges, which prevents cropping.
Dehaze, a feature that has made its way into a lot of photo editing software, is available from Premiere Elements' Effects panel's Advanced Adjustment section. It did a fine job of adding contrast and saturation to my test landscape footage, as you can see in the nearby screenshot.
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Auto Creations
After importing about a thousand clips and photos, the home screen showed more than a dozen Auto Creations that it had produced from my content. From photos shot around the same area and time, it produced pleasant collages, which benefited from a bit of editing and photo swapping. The feature also produced several movie slideshows of varying interest from my test media, with effective transitions and backgrounds. The background music was usually well chosen to fit the image subjects, but if often stopped abruptly, rather than fading out. Some were also so short as to be pointless. In any case, the project can provide starting points for your own creativity.
Guided Edits in Premiere Elements
Premiere Elements' Guided Edit tools hold your hand through the steps of creating effects that are more complex than just pressing a button or adjusting a slider. Simply tap the Guided Edits mode-switcher button to see all 20 of them. When you go through an edit, a right-panel with actions you need to take show up as tooltips that tell you exactly what to do, and even prevent you from clicking Next until you've completed a step. There are now 20 Guided Edits.
There are just two new Guided Edits in 2019: Glass Pane effect and the Luma Fade transition. Last year's update added twice that number, with Freeze-Frame With Motion Titles, Bounce Back (which creates a repeating back-and-forward effect), Fix Action Cam Footage, and Create an Animated Social Post.
The Luma Fade edit has you add a couple clips to the timeline, snap a freeze-frame from the first frame of the second clip, and then use it for a gradient wipe transition. The effect is arresting, as you can see below. The second new Guided Edit for the 2019 version is the Glass Pane effect, found in the Fun Edits section. This takes you through the process of creating a moving matte overlay and blurring an underlying track with the same video. It's a neat effect, as you can see below.
There's a big overlap between video editing enthusiasts and action cam shooters. Top adventure YouTubers like Chris Rogers and Atua Mo'e are good examples. CyberLink PowerDirector also appeals to this audience with its Action Cam Center tool, which dates back a few years. Like that tool, Adobe's Action Cam Fix Action Cam Footage Guided Edit addresses lens distortion, lighting, and color. The two tools differ in that Adobe directs users to the previously described Smart Trim tool, while PowerDirector adds effects like stabilization, time-shift, and freeze-frame. The Adobe tool does improve footage, but for my money, the PowerDirector version of this offering is more powerful.
The Create an Animated Social Post owes its existence to those punchy captioned videos you see on Facebook and Instagram. The guide starts you by directing you to the motion title tool. It also has you apply motion to the main video so that it slides from left to right. Finally, it directs you to the social sharing panel. In all, it's not a very ambitious tool, but some may find it helpful.
The Color Pop Guided Edit replicates an effect that most people first saw in Spielberg's Schindler's List, in which a powerful effect highlighted a young girl in a red coat in the midst of a primarily black-and-white movie. You start with the Color Pop Guided Edit by switching to Expert mode, and then pick the Red Noir Hollywood Look from the Effects menu. Then you open the HSL Tuner tool, from which you can adjust not only the red content, but also that of seven other colors. One weakness of this approach is that it pops everything of the specified color. In CyberLink PowerDirector and other apps, you can create a mask or use motion tracking to limit where the color pops.
Candid Moments
This new tool is available in either Quick or Expert mode, and it lives in the Toolbar's Tools/Video group. Before you can use it, you have to select video clip(s). The tool looks for faces that are in focus and well lighted. It actually did a great job of identifying pleasing stills from my video walk around the office. You can use a slider to create more or fewer shots, or simply click on a tool at the cursor to add one on demand.
Auto Smart Tone
A feature shared by Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements is Auto Smart Tone. After adjusting the image to its best-guess fix, this lighting correction shows a control puck in the center of a rectangle, with four extremes shown in thumbnails in the four corners of the preview window, towards which you can drag the puck and refine the app's correction. In Premiere Elements, the tool finds similar scenes within a clip for correcting at the same time. The tool let me noticeably improve a test clip's lighting.
Advanced Video Effects
The effects we've come to expect in a consumer video editor are all here. There's a wealth of transitions, picture-in-picture, chroma-keying, scaling, opacity, and even keyframe-timed effects. There are dozens of animated and still picture-in-picture presets, but it's easy just to drag a clip above another on the timeline and resize it. And the Graphics tool can insert animated and still objects such as flying birds (and other animals), stars, snow, and speech bubbles.
Elements' Video Collage feature is basically a set of templates for Picture-in-Picture Mode. Available from the Create menu, the Video Collage interface does make it easy to drop clips into prefab templates that even include animated motion. It's a lot easier than messing with keyframe editing! You can also add thematic background music with a button click, and choose whether to play the component video clips all together or in sequence. Cleverly, the background is lowered during speech in the clips (an effect known as ducking), and it stretches to fit your movie.
The app's chroma-key works well, with good control over opacity and chroma threshold, but at one point, when moving the threshold slider, my background in the preview switched to blue. When you add a clip with a solid background to your timeline in Expert mode, a dialog asks if you want to use the Videomerge feature, which makes the background transparent. You can even use Videomerge on non-green-screen clips, for a degree of overlay transparency.
You get several spiffy NewBlue effects (as you do in PowerDirector), including Film Look, which adds damage, sepia tint, and jitter with a choice of wear patterns, to make your movie look like it was shot in Charlie Chaplin's day. Frankly, my interest in photos with retro effects long ago wore as thin as the image on a hundred-year-old negative, but I'm sure many still find them charming. The FilmLooks effects offer a variety of looks, including a bright and blurry Dreamy, Hollywood Movie, which pumps up colors, and Pandora, which gives your movie the cool color cast of that title. These effects, however, are not always adjustable—some are either on or off. And applying a FilmLooks effect removes any other effects adjustments you've made to the clip.
A powerful tool in Premiere Elements is the three-way color corrector. This lets you pump up a selected hue separately for midtones, highlights, and shadows.
Titles and Text
The app now includes over 20 preset Motion Titles in categories like Contemporary, Formal, Geometric, Decorative, Typography, and Fun, along with a custom option. These are very professional looking, and most offer opening, ending, and lower-third options. You also get good customizability with fonts, background image (including transparent through to your video), and you can even change the animation type—wipe to center, fly in with twist, and so on.
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There have also long been attractive themed-titling options, like Prime Time, Aquarium, Coming Book, and Ladybug Picnic. Most offer four templates, for credits, frame, lower third, and title. I had to download some of these before I could use them in my testing, but that is pretty painless since installing the content is all handled within the program. WYSIWYG editing makes customizing the text a snap. But you're not restricted to the present templates: You can choose from a huge variety of fonts and sizes, choose a color, drag the text anywhere on the movie, and apply any of 38 animation styles.
Premiere Elements' title masking lets you show moving video behind your text titles—a cool effect, for sure. The procedure is far from taxing, and once you've gone through it, there's ample opportunity for customization. The screenshot below shows the look you get, although here it's static.
Audio Editing
Premiere Elements' Music Remix tool works with any MP3 file and is the default for sound you've placed in the Music track on the timeline. In several tests, it worked acceptably, though there was often extra silence at the end.
The audio-only view in the timeline opens up the Master volume control. You see waveforms on the standard timeline, and yellow line in the middle helpfully lets you raise or lower a clip's volume graphically. The Adjustments menu includes volume, balance, and treble and bass boost, as well as AudioGain, which normalizes audio to match sound levels of all your sources. From the Effect menu (the same one from which you get all the video effects), you can choose Audio Effects, which include DeNoiser, delay, dynamics, and more. You get some powerful NewBlue audio effects, too, such as Audio Polish, which eliminates most background noise, a hum remover, and a reverb adder that lets you change the room size.
Elements can pump up your digital movie's aural impact with scores and sound effects. The Scores feature includes dozens of musical backgrounds to fit different moods, but the cool part is that they dynamically adjust their length to your movie. Scores are grouped into categories such as Ambient and Urban, as well as genres like Country and Rock-Pop. You can check the fit-to-entire-video box, and then choose whether to delete existing clip sound.
There's a full selection of sound effects—from Air Conditioner to Wire Bunched Hitting Hollow Wood. And a Foley group of sounds—such as Bottle Cap Screwing on and Cell Phone Battery Inserting—can give your video a true Hollywood touch of faux reality. I easily timed an explosion sound effect with a bike jump in my test movie.
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Sharing and Output
You can find most output options in the Organizer app, but there is an Export & Share button in the editor at top right that can send your cinematic creations to DVD, computer files, or the web. You can upload directly to Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, choosing HD or SD quality. Saving files for use on Apple and other mobile devices is also simple. The app offers all kinds of control over your output files. You can choose Flash, MPEG, AVCHD, AVI, WMV, or QuickTime, with options for all standard resolutions and bitrate targets, both maximum and minimum.
The new Animated GIF export option is a godsend if you're sharing a very short video to a destination (like a photo spot on a website) that doesn't accept video. There's not a big obvious choice for it, though. On the Export panel, you need to choose Devices, then Custom, then tap the Advanced Settings button, and then select Animated GIF from the format drop-down. It's best to keep the video as short as possible—definitely under 10 seconds—and to choose a lowish resolution. Otherwise, your resulting file will be too huge to use.
Performance
Premiere Elements feels quick in general video editing procedures, and didn't crash the way some competitors occasionally did during testing. For rendering speed, I tested by creating a movie consisting of four clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions and rendered it to 1080p30 MPEG-4 at 15Mbps, H.264 High Profile. Audio was MPEG AAC Audio: 192 Kbps. I tested on an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card.
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Among the three top consumer video editors, Premiere Elements still lags in rendering speed. On the test movie (whose duration was just under 5 minutes) it took 6:21 (minutes:seconds) seconds to render, compared with 1:59 for PowerDirector, and 4:20 for Corel VideoStudio. Both Pinnacle Studio and PowerDirector took less than half the time Premiere Elements did, and I suspect this is because they support Nvidia graphics hardware acceleration, while Elements only supports Intel integrated graphics acceleration. During export, Elements does show you a progress bar with the percent elapsed and time remaining, but not the elapsed time, current frame, or a video preview, as some other editors do.
Ready for the Red Carpet?
If you like the integration of the Elements Organizer and Photoshop Elements, the 2019 edition of Adobe Premiere Elements is a very good choice. Its many guidance features provide a good education on how to create compelling projects. It is not, however, the most powerful or fastest enthusiast-level video editor. It's also behind when it comes to support for new standards like 360-degree VR content and the HEVC high-efficiency codec used by new iPhones. For that, look to our Editors' Choices for consumer video editing software, CyberLink PowerDirector and Corel's VideoStudio Pro on Windows, and Apple iMovie and Final Cut Pro X on the Mac.
Adobe Premiere Elements
Bottom Line: Adobe's consumer video editing app adds a new start page, Auto Creations, a redesigned quick-editing interface, and faster performance.
- $9.99
- $20.99
- $99.99
- $14.99