Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Elements 8 another winning combo
A great piece of software can be like a great band. Your relationship with it is tentative at first but over time you unblinkingly accept that these people know what they’re doing, and you avidly look forward to each new release. Even the minor ones don’t seem like a waste of your time.
And so it is with Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements, freshly-updated to Version 8 in what’s practically an annual tradition. They remain at the top of the heap for consumer photo and video editing.
I’ve been a longtime admirer of Photoshop Elements, starting with the simple insanity of Adobe producing such an intensely high-value alternative to their $699 Photoshop CS4. It would have been easy for Adobe to engage the value of the Photoshop brand by simply licensing a basic photo editor from somewhere and slapping their own logos and trademarks on it. Instead, they build a strong app that incorporates every feature from CS4 that’s relevant to consumer use.
All of the advanced layer-composition tools and techniques that are a staple of the “real” Photoshop are here in the $99 edition. Last year, my sister sent me a photo of my three nieces at Disneyworld that was in desperate need of improvement. I didn’t even bother to go down to my office machine and open it in CS4. I fixed the color, brightened the kids’ faces, whitened their teeth, combined elements from three different photos to remove a distracting background, and seamlessly changed a window into a properly-lit Tomorrowland poster to establish the location.
Clearly, we’re not talking about the simple half-dozen brightness and color sliders you’ll find in most consumer editors. Features unique to Elements take some of the most sophisticated and complicated features of CS4 and put them in an almost magical new context; complex edits that would require lots of experience and fiddling in any other app are simple three-click Smart operations.
Build a panorama from individual shots? Okay, sure. Spiffy. But you’ve seen that in many other apps. How about the classic problem of lining everyone up for a group photo and taking several shots, but failing to get even one picture where everyone has their eyes open and isn’t picking something they shouldn’t?
In Elements, it’s an easy fix: choose the best photo of the series and then tell the app “Please swap in Ted’s head from Photo #3 and Sylvia’s whole body from Photo #2 in the series.” You do this with just a few vague swipes of the mouse and the results are generally perfect; if the source images are very clean, you won’t even need to fine-tune Photoshop Elements’ smart choices of where Sylvia’s beehive ends and Stan’s hairpiece begins.
Photoshop Elements 8 has very little new razzle-dazzle in that regard. There’s a new Recompose Photo tool, deftly stolen from CS4. Have you ever tried to shrink a photo’s width? Standard photo editors simply smush the pixels together horizontally, resulting in elongated funhouse-mirror-style results. Photoshop Elements 8 intelligently analyzes the photo’s content and identifies the areas that contain nothing of visual interest. Instantly, a boring photo of your kids milling around the vicinity of a statue becomes a tight, interesting composition. Like the best Photoshop Elements features, it provokes a “Hey ... do that again!” when there are witnesses in the room.
I also appreciate the new Exposure enhancements to its photomerge tool. Just as the Group Shot photomerge tool can assemble one great shot from the people in multiple images, Elements 8 can take assemble a single, properly-exposed image from a series of shots with varying exposure (such as, one photo with the flash turned on and another with it turned off). It’s not exactly High Dynamic Range photography but it’s a nice feature.
The heaviest upgrade to Photoshop Elements 8 is in its organizational tools. The Organizer can now identify and tag faces (as in every other instance of this sort of feature, it requires initial hand-holding but soon gets better with experience). Smart Tags also apply to the quality and other content elements of an image, which is a huge time-saver when triaging a memory card full of photos. Images that are shaky or badly-exposed are automatically tagged and weeded-out.
The Organizer shares many of these features with Premiere Elements, Adobe’s consumer video editor. It’s a stronger library system than anything Adobe has put into Elements before. It’s much easier to tag photos and clips, and now your library can be shared between multiple machines running Elements. Hell, I’m just happy that it’s finally easy to share content between the photo and video editors. It’s all one cloud of content and you can pull a photo into your video project without feeling as though you’ve left Premiere.
The face-identification and “bad image” detectors apply to the processing of video clips. It’s the basis of Instant Movie, which is another one of those “Hey ... do that again!” features.
There’s a reason why I don’t do as much video editing as I’d like: it’s tedious as hell. I probably brought three or four hours of video home from China but I haven’t even dumped it from my memory cards. Three hours of video can easily mean twelve hours of screening, selecting, and assembling.
Instant Movie analyzes your clips for both quality and content, and automatically throws together a rough cut. I was skeptical. How good could Mister Spock possibly be at selecting and editing shots?
Pretty damned good, it turns out. If you’re not terribly discriminating, you can burn the Instant Movie to a DVD and mail it off to the relatives without any further ado. Even if you know who Thelma Schoonmaker is without having to turn to Wikipedia, you’ll find that the Instant Movie is a terrific jumping-off point. I feel as though 75 percent of the final cut has been performed for me ... the rest is a series of tweaks and fine-tunings, all of which are easy as pie to pull off. Even here, I’m aided by features that automatically fix the sound and image quality, stabilize shaky-cam footage, and quickly trim the fat from individual clips.
I’m an Artiste, so of course I didn’t spend all afternoon playing with Premiere’s intensely fun motion-tracking tools. I did not add E.T. to the handlebars of this bike rider I filmed in Beijing. That would have been very un-Thelma of me, wouldn’t you agree?
For the non-Artistes in the house: these tools make it easy to lay down, say, a cartoon thought-balloon that follows a person around in the scene. The results aren’t what you’d call devastatingly flawless, but it’s a fun and effective feature.
Both Premiere and Photoshop Elements 8 are $99. Photoshop Elements 8 is also available in a Mac edition, shipping next month. You can buy a bundle for $149 ($119 with rebate) or upgrade individual apps from their previous editions. And free trial editions are available from www.adobe.com/elements/.
I review these apps nearly every year because I’m a fan. And I tend to end these reviews with the same sentiments: Photoshop and Premiere Elements are two of the best deals in consumer software. They offer unparalleled power to move a photo or video from “Ehh” to “Wow!” with ease and style.