New: Easy-to-Use Adobe Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements 2018

Adobe has just announced the newest release of its consumer photo and video editing applications, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 2018, for Mac and Windows. In the professional editing industry, Adobe has been one of the few top names for many years. Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects are found in virtually every studio. The Elements versions are for those editors who want to make creative and polished photos and videos, but quicker and easier than possible in the pro versions, and they’re designed with the weight and sophistication of Adobe’s resources and experience.

The Elements versions provide a more automated process backed by advanced Adobe algorithms. Click a button or two, and Elements will intelligently analyze your photo or video, and determine the best solution in each case. You can also make further adjustments based on personal preference, but even this process is designed to be quicker and simpler.

In as little as just minutes or even less, you can have beautiful photos and videos (including batches of photos) ready to be shared on social media, printed, or burned to DVD. They’ll be complete with all the right parts highlighted, issues that need fixing fixed, titles, music, menus, and more. Advanced one-click features, like Whiten Teeth and Open Closed Eyes, will ensure that your subjects come out looking impressive. There are also special side features for creating calendars and greeting cards that you can print at home or send to a professional printer, scrapbooks, and photo and video collages.

Well Integrated

Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements are powerful and comprehensive solutions for moments we capture during family vacations, kids’ school recitals, and similar adventures and events. They’re also great for YouTube videos and vlogs, sales presentations, and the like, as well as for beginner enthusiasts. Both support high-resolution files and popular file formats, so you can work with your high-megapixel and 4K smartphone, DSLR, action cam, or any other camera.

A major feature is that the two programs integrate well for those who like to shoot still photos and videos. They have a similar user interface and similar workflow, and share the same file manager, an exceptional stand-alone tool called the Organizer. Not many editing applications have such a self-contained file manager. Normally, you’re limited to importing files and selecting them as needed, but the Organizer kind of has a mind of its own. It takes all the hundreds of photos and videos on your computer, automatically arranges them in one place by criteria such as dates, people, places, and faces, and gives you a visual view of them all. It additionally allows you to tag them as you like, including by tagging faces using your Facebook friends list.

The same Organizer appears in both applications, so you can jump between the two programs and have access to the same media in both. There are also other features that are found in both applications, such as Slideshow, and the Organizer allows these features to work cross-platform. For example, click a few buttons, and Slideshow will dig into the Organizer and produce a fancy, animated slideshow of your best photos and short video clips, along with a theme. Once it’s done, you can make manual adjustments, adding/removing photos and videos as you like.

Both applications also have many Guided Edit features, which lead you step by step through applying a specific effect or function. Photoshop Elements offers 49 Guided Edits, such as Replace Background. This Guided Edit will walk you through placing a more interesting background behind the subject of a photo. Although the Guided Edit process works step by step, it takes only seconds. Premiere Elements has 19 Guide Edits, like Fix Action Cam Footage, which guides you through quickly making trims, correcting color, and fixing lens distortion in your action camera videos.

How Can Closed Eyes Be Open?

The overall workflow in both applications is largely based on one-click tools that are also highly automated like the Guided Edits. In Photoshop Elements, one-click tools allow you to add effects, looks, border frames, and textures, turn photos into illustrations, paint on effects, add photo text, make panoramas, and much more. You can also let Photoshop Elements analyze a photo and suggest five effects that it thinks would be ideal for your photo. And you can make many different corrections to perfect your photos, such as turn frowns into smiles, open closed eyes, whiten teeth, remove “pet eye” discolorations, remove camera shake in selfies, and remove haze in landscapes. A lot of this can also be done to batches of photos at a time.

You may wonder, how can closed eyes be open? Photoshop Elements will search through your photos in the Organizer, find a photo of the subject with open eyes, and blend it into the photo of the subject with closed eyes. Open Closed Eyes is a new feature in Photoshop Elements 2018. Other new features include multiple new Guided Edits, Auto Curate, major enhancements to the Organizer, and a redesigned and upgraded Slideshow.

Using one-click tools in Premiere Elements 2018, you can add graphics, text, effects that move with the subject, standard graphics, cartoon looks, transitions, animated titles, slow-motion, fast-motion, motion menus, fancy credits, and much more, as well as choose from more than 50 musical scores and 250 sound effects and easily remix music to match up to the length of your movie. You can even go as far as select to make instant-themed movies. When shooting video, one is prone to camera shake and other issues need correcting. Premiere Elements 2018 lets you auto-fix shaky footage, adjust color with sliders, auto-balance audio elements, fix audio problems easily, combine elements from different videos, and much more.

New features in Premiere Elements 2018 include several new Guide Edits, a Candid Moments feature that allows you to extract photos from raw-footage videos (in a special way as opposed to just pulling freeze frames), and Smart Trim, which automatically trims the bad, keeps the good, and brings together the best scenes of your video based on the style of your video. Premiere Elements is designed to have you in mind all the way through. It makes automatic export recommendations based on involved criteria so you know what formats to export in depending on what your destination is, whether YouTube, a DVD or otherwise.

Both Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2018 allow you to share your creations with friends and family on social media right from the interface. Also, even with all the automated and easy-to-use features, you can still get help right within the interface via eLive. And that’s Photoshop Elements 2018 and Premiere Elements 2018 in a nutshell. They’re offered individually, as well as combined in one package for those who want both. Create beautiful photos and videos in seconds.

What are your experiences with previous versions of Photoshop and Premiere Elements? How professional did your final photos and videos look? We’d love to hear from you, below, in the Comments section.