Adobe - Photoshop Elements 2022 & Premiere Elements 2022 - Windows [Digital]

First thing I want to state is that I had some issues getting the software to work on my fastest gaming laptop. I then loaded it onto another my Asus Zenbook which it works fine on. Both PCs are running Windows 11 and that could part of the problem with the gaming laptop. However, Photoshop Elements 2022 I does have a few quirks I mention in the review below. Being a part time photographer I’m pretty familiar with Photoshop and have used it since version 5 in the late 90s. Before that Corel PhotoPaint, now known as Paintshop. I also used Photoshop Elements 2 that came with my Canon 300D Digital Rebel and Ps Elements 11 and 14 which I bought before I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud and the Ps-Lr Photographer plan. Adobe refers to Photoshop as Ps and Lightroom as Lr as will I from here on out. Ps Elements has been the standard for entry into the Ps world since the early 2000s because it is a cheaper cut down version of Ps. Back then Ps was about $700 and Elements $80 or $100. I really don’t remember exactly. It was also included with certain cameras like I mentioned above. You got the key editing features of Ps for much less or even free. Can’t beat that. When Adobe switched to the subscription plan for Ps it made it much more affordable for people like me. But if you don’t need the extreme complexity and power of full-blown Photoshop and or just got your first camera and want to learn how to edit photos, then Ps Elements is what you need. Over the years I have seen both Ps and Ps Elements get better and even more complex. However, with this version of Ps Elements feels like some things have been taken away or even been made more limited than they were with previous versions. Like the Dehaze feature that was introduced with Ps Elements 14 even before Ps itself! if I remember correctly. It was in the Adobe Camera RAW section I believe. I don’t have a PC with Ps Elements 14 on anymore it to check for sure. It’s now under filters in Ps Elements and doesn’t seem to be nearly as effective as in Ps and Lr. Drop shadows and other layer effects seem to be feature reduced compared to previous versions. However, there do seem to be many more presets, effects and templates compared to earlier versions. Lots of options for turning your photos into different types of art work styles. Great for scrapbooking and craft projects. One thing I noticed on both PCs is reaction time when you move the sliders to adjust anything. When you click on a slider and move it you do not see any effect on your photo as you are moving it like you do with Full Photoshop and Lightroom until you stop moving it or let up on the button. When you let up on the button the effect is instant. If you just stop moving the slider and keep the button held down there’s a 1 second delay. THAT IS NOT how full-blown Photoshop or Lightroom works!!! You see the effect of what you are doing with the sliders as you move them unless you have a really slow PC. I see the effects of moving sliders using Ps or Lr on my iPad in real time too. Using filter effects, it’s even longer at 2 seconds unless you pop the button up!! So, Adobe needs to fix this ASAP! That would be a deal breaker for me right there. But others may not mind. It also feels a bit sluggish overall compared to full Ps. On the upside Ps Elements will teach how to do almost anything you need or want to do with your photos. It will organize them if you want it to. Once you master the basics and want or need more, just move right into full-blown Photoshop which includes Lightroom. Lr can also organize your photos and pretty much do magic to them exposure processing wise (white balance, sharpening, contrast, color saturation, lens corrections for individual lenses and more). Way beyond what elements can do. NO, I do not work for Adobe and Not trying to upsell anyone. Just stating the facts. If Elements are all you need then stick with that. The basic CC “Photographer” plan for Full Photoshop and Lightroom starts at $10 a month, not $30. If you were to get Full Photoshop and Full Premiere together that’s $30. Conclusion for Ps Elements: If you can find it on sale for $50 to $70 it’s a great buy. Not so much at $99. Might as well pay a little more and get full-blown Ps and Lr for a year. It has help features too and there’s hundreds of videos on YouTube to teach you how to use it. Now for Premiere. I have not used the full version of it any other version in any form. I have used a few versions of Corel’s Video Studio Ultimate. Both are about equal from what I can tell and other reviews I’ve read over the years agree with my assessment. I do think Video Studio has more options but it’s more cluttered and every time you run it, they try to get you to upgrade to a newer version. At a discount of course. Premiere didn’t do this to me but some others said it did. Like Ps Elements, Premiere will show you how to use it with projects and templates. You can mix videos with photos on the drag and drop time line. Change playback speeds in the timeline and do all the over used affects you see on TV. Fortunately, I didn’t see fake video glitching on list. You can do the usual things like switching between videos, insert transitions, add text, do basic audio editing, add new a new audio-sound track and then render it all down to a final video. You can choose video resolution and quality but your choices are pretty basic. Corel wins big here with way more options. I like to do timelapse videos and you can dump a few thousand 1920X1080 full HD stills on the timeline and turn it into a time lapse but it’s not as easy to do as it is in the Corel’s editor. Sadly, when playing the timelapse in the editor it would glitch out and jump and jerk back and forth about half way through and hang. I cleared the photos out and tried again. Same thing. Rendered it to see if that fixed it but it rendered that way too. I edited some videos in full HD and it did ok. No glitches other than the timelapse. Conclusion for Premiere Elements, I like it. I like it’s clean and uncluttered look. Like Ps it will teach you how to use it. Lots of presets for everything and basic manual adjustments. Other than doing the time lapse I talked about above, it worked fine. Same as with Ps Elements if you can get it on sale for $50 to $70 I highly recommend it. For $99 you might want to check out the competition. It’s a much more expensive step up to get full-blown Premiere at $20 a month as opposed to Ps at $10 per month.

Perhaps the best feature of the Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements combined package is the reasonable fixed price for software that can get the basics of photo and video editing done. Everyone knows that Photoshop is the industry standard, but the full version requires a subscription and therefore significant expense. Elements is a stripped-down adaptation of the full version of Photoshop, and certainly contains enough features for beginner and amateur users. It is advertised as being much easier to use than the full version, which may be true, but I still found that the learning curve is very steep. Unless you are already very familiar with Photoshop, you might find yourself spending hours reading and listening to tutorials in order to use this software, as I did this past weekend. And this is despite the fact that I have been using various kinds of image editing software, including very early version of Photoshop, since the 1990s. I will say that the three-tier main menu choices (Quick, Guided, and Expert) should be very helpful to beginners. If you, for example, simply want to restore old photographs, the choices under Quick will indeed get the job done quickly for you without requiring much effort. Guided gives you more choices, including removing objects and resizing the photo. Expert gives you more control with more features. Sadly, the one feature I hoped for the most is not well implemented in Photoshop Elements: restoring and colorizing an old photograph. At first I struggled to find commands to do this. I searched for help online and discovered that advice apparently only for the full version. The advice said to first change the mode to CMYK, but that option wasn't available in Elements. The next advice was to apply an AI Neural filter, but that filter was not available. And I could not find a way to download the filter, except from shady sites that wanted me to sign up for cryptocurrency. Eventually I found in my menu Enhance-Colorize, which did colorize my old family photo to some degree. But the result was far inferior to the enhance-colorize service available on my genealogical website (compare the posted photos). So, even though Photoshop Elements has some very nice restoring features (spot healing brush is especially useful), I am disappointed that it does not colorize very well. Premier Elements, on the other hand, continues to be exactly what I need for video editing. I have tried other video editing software products over the years, some of them quite expensive, and none works as reliably as Premier Elements. Quite simply, it handles all of the basic tasks I need it to do—splicing together files, editing out segments I do not need, creating transitions and titles, incorporating photos, adding audio or music tracks, and creating DVDs—it is all there and easy to use. Past versions have been invaluable to me for converting old VHS tapes into digital videos, and the 2022 version will continue to be vital for this and other video editing tasks.

I am a novice when it comes to photo/video editing. In this Insta-age, manipulating my photos has not been my strongest suite. Normally, as an iPhone user but uses a Windows computer, I have not found the need to use photoshop. I’ve used it before almost 10 years ago when I worked at a Office Supply store and have not that been creative, but always wanted to. On top of that, I have not found the need to edit on my computer, as all my photos were on my iPhone. Now, with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2022, I wanted to take the deep dive and learn to use it as my daughter has been wanting to utilize her own creative skills. I found that there are many simple and easy tools that would be familiar and offers guided tours for simple editing. The Object Removal tool has been really fun to use as it eliminates any unwanted objects in your photo. It operates like the Magic Eraser and tries to reassemble the picture with available background objects. Even using the Open Closed Eyes option was enjoyable; although the samples they have to use from are very limiting. The entire program works well on my Surface Pro7, and I purposefully wanted to use it on this device because of the tablet ability and the pen which works well instead of a mouse. It has helped with my ability to edit compared to my desktop and using just a mouse and no touchscreen option. The only noticeable updates is the instantly turn photos into art, the GIF maker, Perfect Pet step-by-step edits just to name a few. I downloaded my photos from iCloud to my PC and wanted to see how useful or helpful Photoshop Elements is. Thankfully, there is an Organizer tool that is able to file all your photos in easy to find and label folders. The Home Screen for APE 2022 is very user friendly and similar to the previous year. There are a lot of helpful tools to what I want to use and guided me on how I wanted to manipulate my photos. As a novice, it was a great experience to see what I can adjust. Many of my older photos from older phones had terrible megapixels, or the exposures were off, etc. Things like lightning, glare, eye fixes, backgrounds, were fun to edit. Even using the Video edits was a great experience and I began to increase my comfort on what I wanted to do. It’s amazing to what some simple writings can do to my older (and newer) pics in my library. I even used the traditional Photoshop usage, and found it easy on layering and during my pics. No they are not studio quality, but it’s a start and is an ongoing learning curve for me. Overall, it has been a joy to use with all of the helpful tools and guides. For newbies or experts, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2022 is a must have in creating more beautiful memories for your already existing pictures and videos.

I am not a professional blogger or photographer but I do take a lot of videos and photographs while capturing images of my friends and family. I capture life’s moments using everything from 4k video cams to my iphone. A lot of times those shots/videos are taken in the spur of the moment so they may not be framed correctly or at the right exposure or even include things I wish were not in the photo. Because of this I started buying Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Premier Elements long ago. I’ve always felt that this software matches my expertise level, it guides me through things that I don’t use often enough to be proficient at but also gives me total control in the expert mode for when I really want to edit my photos or videos. If you have used either Photoshop Elements or Elements Premier in the past you will feel right at home with this new version. The other plus of this software is the enormous number of tutorials, videos and documents on the web by Adobe and 3rd parties to help teach you how to get the most out of it. The home page allows you to select Photoshop Elements, the Organizer or Premier Elements. The Organizer does what it says by helping you organize all your photos and videos using several tools built into the software. If you select Photoshop Elements or Premier Elements you will open to the project page where you can select Quick, Guided and Expert mode. This 2022 version includes 87 new Guided options which includes some new features over the standard guides of past versions. Some of the newer features like adding moving overlays to photos or movies were pretty straight forward but I found the Auto Reframe that allows you to resize your video a tad confusing. I am sure within the next 30 days someone will be posting videos on using the Auto Reframe feature that will show me what I need to do better. Doing all the typical editing or adding special effects is pretty straight forward and I think this is where the Guided options really pay off. The Guide takes the numerous options included in the software and helps you chose the right ones. The only downside I have found with using the Expert mode is that there are so many help guides on the web that you have to make sure you find one that is specific to the 2022 version. Adobe keeps automating and improving the software so I think it was worth upgrading so I could use the latest features like adding the cool overlays and extending the backgrounds and creating perfect pet photos.

Pros Much simpler than pro tools Wizards make advanced tasks easier Doesn’t require a subscription to use Still includes expert mode Ai selection tools work without fuss Tons of filters, effects, and transitions included Cons Doesn’t have any mobile capability Tries to immediately upsell to pro products Some wizards don’t fully explain usage Before and After display preview sometime backwards Preview sliders delay adjusting preview Adobe makes some very powerful tools for professionals, but the learning curve is too steep for casual use. Photoshop Elements and Premier Elements is Adobe’s solution. They take the most useful tools and add wizards and tutorials in place to simplify the process for the average user. Unlike the pro tools, there is no subscription fee. You buy it once and you are done. However, unlike the pro tools you get no mobile support or future upgrades as a tradeoff. Just like the pro tools, you need to create an Adobe account to download and activate your software. Although they have the previous version of Photoshop Elements in the Windows Store, they do not include Premier. It would be nice to see Adobe take more advantage of the Windows Store to keep things simple. Since they have their own tools, this means you have a separate notification and update tool to run in the background contributing to system bloat. While Adobe’s Elements products are simpler, some of complication of Adobe products finds its way in. The tool used to install and update Elements is called Creative Cloud Desktop. One of the first things you see when opening is how Adobe is trying to upsell you on their higher end products the moment you open it. They also have a resources section, which at first seems helpful, with tutorials and things like extra fonts until you investigate further. It’s at that point you find they mostly bookmarks to different parts of their website and require either an additional purchase or subscription. There is certainly valuable information to get from this, but it is buried in a list of trails and upsells. If you have used Adobe products in the past you are accustomed to this, but it would be nice if Adobe could tone it done a bit and remove the bloat. While complication, bloat, and odd glitches are normal for Adobe what makes their products worthwhile are the features they provide. The Ai selection tools and adjustments make advanced tasks almost effortless. You can erase subjects from a picture, move and resize them, or even change the background without needing to manually select the edges of what you are trying to move. Their Ai selection tools also do a very good job of detecting where the edge is. On videos you can quickly add the provided stock music, add text effects, create photo collage videos, transitions, and apply filters without getting overly technical. An example of how well the Ai works is using the perfect pet tool. It quickly recognized the black lab in the photo as well as his play pool were separate from the rest of the scene and properly selected just that area. With the adjustment tools the black fur could be lightened to see features more easily against the sunny backdrop without unnecessarily lightening the entire scene. As a test, the background changing tool was used to swap out the background for a sunset mountain scene and balance the tone and color of the two to make it look as if the dog is in the foreground of the scene. The overall effect took seconds and looks convincing. In typical Adobe fashion, some minor bugs creeped in. When using the before and after option to see how the photo changes the before and after picture were reversed. Another minor issue, not a bug, is when using adjustment sliders. Adobe created a transition delay where changes occur smoothly. This means if you are sliding it back and forth to see the difference you must pause to wait for the transition. This makes it harder to find the perfect setting change. You also can’t specify values manually in most cases. On the video side, you can easily drop pictures and videos onto the timeline. If you use the included music all you do is choose Fit Entire Video and it will shorten or lengthen the song to match. You can easily fade the music in or out and adjust the volume of the track. Also included are filters to make the videos look old fashioned, worn out, or as if they are part of a dream scene. You can add text and animate it. You can also grab photos from your videos. There are far more features than could be listed here. The one thing to keep in mind is that previews will often appear choppy until you export it. Even on an 11th Generation Core i7 processor adding one track of music and one filter cause the video to become choppy in preview. Once exported though it looked perfectly smooth. Exporting is similarly easy as Premier gives you plain English explanations of what each type of exported video is used for. Final Thoughts Adobe still needs to work on streamlining their products as well as their catalog, but the effectiveness of their tools is hard to deny. If you can put up with some minor bugs and an extra step occasionally to get some of the most competent tools available for amateur photo and video editing available, then Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premier Elements deserves a serious consideration.

First off, I have never used PS or Premier before. The idea has been intimidating, so I never tried to learn. Let me tell you, the amount of tutorials offered by Adobe is incredible, and was a nice surprise for a noob like me. Adobe Sensei AI assisted with adjusting my photo to give it the look I wanted, without me having to manually adjust, which was a breath of fresh air. There is even a Pet Guided Edit to assist with editing pet photos, which is pretty neat. As for Premiere, you get the same great experience (quick, guided, expert modes, for example), but for video editing. I was able to shoot a quick video on my iPhone, upload into Premiere, and add effects, text, and even animated overlays (pretty neat!). If you are a social media person, this can be used to edit your videos the way you like quickly, and efficiently to get the desired effect. I am very much impressed with the overall experience with Adobe - Photoshop Elements 2022 & Premiere Elements 2022 and look forward to learning from the vast amount learning material Adobe offers. The Sky is the Limit!

Before I start my review I need to say this is from the viewpoint of someone who hasn't ever used Adobe Premiere and only used Photoshop once, about 8 years ago for about 10 minutes. That said, I also have a small but growing YouTube channel and have been looking for better video editing software than what I've been using thus far (which has just been the free software that comes on macbooks). Being someone with absolutely no experience using Adobe premiere, this software has a pretty steep learning curve. For my first run through I went through the entire process of editing a video for my YouTube channel. The video is just a short 10 minute how-to style video, so it didn't really require very advanced tools. Just some basic cutting, adding text and transitions, and fixing audio. What normally would have taken me a few hours, took me days as I stumbled around the software trying to figure things out. Even using the 'guided' feature there was a lot missing. I found myself spending most of my time googling and watching YouTube videos. I will say though as I'm learning how to do things I'm getting much faster and better at it, it's just taking a while, especially since it's much more robust than the software I've been using. But at the same time, a lot of basic functions seem to be more complicated than they should be. One of the more frustrating aspects though of using this suite of tools is how unreliable it is. The software is constantly freezing and crashing. I learned quick that I need to continuously save my work. I started working on a second vid, imported the files, fixed some audio, and spent about an hour getting my initial editing done when it not only crashed, but as soon as I loaded the project back up, everything I had done was gone, even the imported files, causing me to start completely over. These programs are installed on a high-end gaming laptop that was just released about 6 months ago too, so I know my system isn't the problem as it far exceeds the basic requirements this software needs. Besides the freezing and crashing, just using it can get choppy at times. One thing I noticed is that anytime I add a simple basic transition between clips, it would bog the program down. The audio would keep playing back as normal but the video would either be choppy or just freeze. Even when reopening the project with existing transitions, as soon as the playback went over those transitions it would start getting choppy again. The issues don't stop there. I ran into several other problems that I've found are surprisingly not all that uncommon. First is when using an external drive. I have a newer and very fast external SSD that I use to store all of my videos and have worked from for the past year without issue. Not so with Adobe. Everything seems to be fine when you first start a new project using files on an external drive, but as soon as you stop, or go back into the project after closing it, it has trouble finding the files again, even after telling it exactly where they are. And yet again, I ended up losing some of the work I had done. Now I just copy all the files for a project onto my computer locally and delete them as soon as I'm done with the project. It's a workaround that shouldn't be necessary at this stage of software that's been around for so long. Another issue is when using an external monitor. Again this software gets finicky. As soon as I tried to change the window size the program would disappear where I couldn't get it to come back onto the screen. Found out this is another common problem that's been known for some time. The solution is that whichever monitor you use the program on must be set to be the primary monitor. To continue the issues with external hardware, after plugging my headset in, the audio continued to come through the main speakers even though everything else on the laptop was going through the headset as it should. Turns out that Adobe has its own hardware settings that needs to be set outside of the computers settings. What makes it a bit more annoying is you have to manually change the output setting every time you switch between using a headset and just the internal speakers. This was more of an annoyance but also leads to my next criticism... Some of the menus, like the one for hardware settings, look extremely dated. Maybe adobe is taking the "if it's not broke don't fix it" approach, but it's weird to see brand new software dated 2022 contain UI that looks like its from 2002, but maybe that's the software developer in me coming out a bit. It's a shame there's so many issues because there are a lot of great features and capabilities that someone like me with a growing YouTube channel needs. Unfortunately though, if I could choose any photo and video editing software to use, I would look elsewhere first before going with Adobe.

I've used Photoshop Elements on and for for 20+ years; I have to say each release brings improvements and potentially new headaches. I did my testing on a 16Gb i5/G10, I have bigger faster machine but this on happens to have the bulk of my images (not stored in the cloud) on it and a set of my parents 8mm childhood videos, recently converted to DVD format. The new Guided (AI) functionality works surprisingly well, however it is a little heavy handed at times leaving it's work somewhat pixelized where it had originally been, well lets just say just dull/flat. I found in a couple of weeks of using it the most valuable feature was what under Enhancements they call Haze Removal, this did a wonderful job of turning gray skies to blue, but in a very natural way. It also improved the appearance of clouds in enhancing contrast and shadows in a very natural way. The smooth skin Effect was subtle. The open closed eye works well if you had a similar picture of the same person at approximately the same distance and angle, where it works magic. Now if the person is wearing glasses it tends to make more of a mess (at least where there are some reflections). The whiten teeth effect works well if there is plenty of contrast around the lips, but if there is not you might find it lighting the nose's color too. I found when it worked it was an excellent touch-up tool that looked very natural. I've run into this concept elsewhere, an it can certainly go too far. But it does do a good job, as does the red-eye reduction enhancement. I was not as happy with the auto sharpen, as it caused some edges to become noticeably pixelized. The more complex editing functions dealing with layers and composite editing work reasonably well but have a real learning curve to become proficient with them. The different layers styles and naming/grouping takes some getting used to. The Filter library and number of ways to transform you image into a new picture is quite remarkable, I can't say I'd likely do this very often thought but for thouse of you that want to artful, there is a lot that can be done. In general the Photoshop elements can help you take a decent images and make it really pop. I photograph a lot of lightning when I can; and it improved several images I had previously edited and made them better, pretty easily. But as I opend more images without closing then I stated to run into some problems. I'd attempt to apply a new effect or change a layer and I ran into memory errors (can't do that now...) or screen freeze of my system. I have a 4K monitor tied to my Laptop (with NVidia video card); I had functions that wound work on one screen and not the other, and things that would be display on my second screen even though I was working on my primary screen. Ultimately I had to restart the system to get it to behave normally again. When dealing with .mpg4 video, all have to be imported into your video asset library. This conversion of 640x480 video, in my case was quite time consuming, I attempted to import about 24 files, between 5 and 30min each and it took over 30min, after which I had to reboot; as my system again froze. Lesson learned, don't bite off too much at a time. Then in editing those I had difficulties using the Smart Fix tools to try to improve the grainy video quality. After exiting the premise editor it became stuck in memory, just about every time I used it. I had to use task manager more than once to kill it so that it could be reloaded. I had much better luck using Photoshop Elements than I did in accomplishing anything with the Premier Video editor. In the end Elements is a good photo editor, just don't open to many images as I found it got buggy with a lot of active images. Premiere Video was buggy from the start, causing more crashes than I'm accustomed to in a couple of months, in a few hours. It needs improvement, I can't recommend it as it is.