I don’t usually test the entry-level end of creative professional software, but I was intrigued by the [1] Photoshop/Premiere Elements bundle since [2] Adobe had tied the Photoshop products [3] into one big “family” and Photoshop Elements wasn’t just a dumbed-down version of Photoshop. And now that I am getting into video and have some experience [4] working with Premiere CS3, I was excited to try out Premiere Elements 4 for the first time. Note to Mac users: Premiere Elements 4 is only for Windows, so you can either run the applications in a virtual OS (like I did, using [5] Parallels Desktop) or leave Premiere Elements out of the equation and [6] purchase Photoshop Elements 6 separately.

Compared to Apple’s direct competitors, iPhoto and iMovie, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements are more robust, provide a more professional user experience, and offer very powerful and easy-to-use tools to organize, retouch and publish photos and movies. With that being said, this bundle doesn’t compete with Apple iLife when it comes to creating music (iLife has Garageband) and Web sites (iLife has iWeb). iLife also has iDVD and .Mac Web Gallery, both of which are covered by Photoshop/Premiere Elements’ publishing features.

Very well-organized

Photoshop Elements’ Organizer is an excellent combination of the old Photoshop File Browser, Bridge and Lightroom. In the Organizer you can maintain your photo and media archive, create albums and smart albums to organize material, tag elements with keywords, filter, rate, sort and use Quick Share to quickly share photos with people, and from the Organizer you can take images through the fixing/editing process and on to publishing or sharing them electronically, just like in Lightroom. The interface is deceptively simple, which to me is actually a relief: Bridge is basically a more robust Organizer for all your computer’s files, but it is a good deal more complex and (I would say) so complex it can be daunting. The Organizer, in contrast, is much more accessible and easy to use. I think Bridge would benefit if its development team looked to the Organizer for ideas to simplify it. The Organizer also borrows Lightroom’s integrated color-correcting and editing tools, but not in the same way Lightroom does: Lightroom has many simplified Camera Raw controls available right in its Library module’s Quick Develop panel, while the Organizer only offers quick one-button fixes (Auto Smart Fix, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Red Eye Fix and more) and access to the Quick Edit, Full Edit and Guided Edit screens. Photoshop Elements’ Quick Edit screen is comparable to Lightroom’s Quick Develop panel, but is even more simplified and clearly explained for those who aren’t familiar with Camera Raw settings. You can even bring up a map (based on Yahoo! Maps) and stick photos in their geographic locations. You’ll see pins on the map, and when you click one later you can see which photos are associated with the area. I think Lightroom in particular would benefit from a similar feature.

For the prosumer or general consumer with a little point-and-shoot camera, the Organizer is perfect. In today’s era of digital photography I believe organization is as essential as creativity and technical skill with the camera and Photoshop, and Adobe has several good organizers in Bridge, Lightroom and the Organizer. They do different things and focus on different people’s needs (Bridge for file management, Lightroom for digital photography, Organizer for consumer and prosumer media) but the Organizer stands out from the other two for its ease of use and simplicity.

Editing is as robust as you want it

It must have been quite a dilemma for the Photoshop Elements team when deciding just how close Photoshop Elements should get to Photoshop’s robust features: some users will want to play with every Photoshop tool to be had, while others would simply get confused by the plethora of tools. The end result is something of a tiered editing system that can be as robust as the user wants it to be:

• Auto adjustments are a cinch to use (one click and you’re done) and surprisingly good. There are Auto buttons for smart fix, color, levels, contrast, sharpen and red eye fix as well as a Crop button that brings up a nice walkthrough of the process and an interface that makes cropping easy.

[8]

The Quick Fix window. Click to enlarge.

• Quick Fix brings up the Edit screen with a simplified Photoshop interface (Zoom, Hand, Wand, Crop and Red Eye tools only) and sliders for general fixes, lighting, color and sharpening. The Quick Fix is perfect for those wanting some creative control over how their pictures look without needing to know Photoshop’s tools and adjustments.

[9]

The Guided Edit window. Click to enlarge.

• Guided Edit has even less Photoshop tools than Quick Fix (Zoom and Hand tools only) but shows a list of actions in the sidebar (”Crop Photo,” “Remove a Color Cast,” “Correct Skin Tone,” “Guide for Editing a Photo” and much more). Click one and Photoshop Elements will walk you through the process and give access to Photoshop’s tools as needed. Select “Guide for Editing a Photo” and the interface will guide you through cropping, lightening/darkening, touch up and sharpening, offering sliders or tools as needed. This is wonderful for those new to digital photography who want to improve their pictures without learning the technology.

[10]

The Full Edit window. Click to enlarge.

• Full Edit is practically the full Photoshop experience, with most of the tools and menu items intact (though they may be moved, like the Edit–>Transform [now under Image] and Image Size and Canvas Size, now under Image–>Resize). Many of Photoshop’s panels have either been eliminated or partially absorbed by their tool’s Options bar (Brushes, for one) and there are many Photoshop features that aren’t available, such as actions, channels, Smart Sharpen, animation, Lab color mode and all the specialized tools found in Photoshop CS3 Extended. Photoshop Elements is therefore not for users who want to get really good at Photoshop but are looking to save money by purchasing Elements ($99) instead of Photoshop CS3 ($649). That being said, if you can’t afford Photoshop or if you don’t expect to need the full range of Photoshop features, Photoshop Elements has at least 75% of the features Photoshop CS3 has and at 15% of the price! The power offered by the Full Edit screen makes Photoshop Elements an unbelievable value, something that should probably be sold for at least a hundred dollars more.

Two major features of Photoshop—layer masks and Smart Objects—are supported by Photoshop Elements but users can’t actually make their own. Layer masks are available only on adjustment layers, and can’t be added to other layers. However, here’s a tip: if you select your image and make it a pattern (Edit –> Define Pattern) then you can insert the image as a Pattern adjustment layer, complete with its own layer mask. The technique requires an extra step but the results are the same as a traditional layer mask. As for Smart Objects, users can’t create their own but Photoshop Elements comes with a ton of good graphics, backgrounds and clip art (look for Artwork, under the Create button) and they all appear to be Smart Objects. You can make a Smart Object into a normal pixel-based layer with Layer–>Simplify Layer. It’s like the functionality is there to handle these Smart Objects but the application doesn’t want to acknowledge they exist. I think Smart Objects would be a great feature for consumer and prosumer users since they allow upscaling without degrading resolution, and resolution is one of the easiest things for a beginner to degrade. Smart Objects, done correctly, can save a lot of frustration.

Let’s share!

Apple’s Aperture has had the upper hand over Lightroom when it comes to printing: Lightroom prints only single sheets, while Aperture has been able to print portfolios and books from the beginning. However, Photoshop Elements has both of them beat when it comes to creating projects and sharing photos. Users can create photo books, calendars, collages, online galleries and slideshows, as well as sharing via e-mail, burning to disk, and ordering prints online. Some of these services are provided through a partnership with Kodak. As with all things in Photoshop Elements, creating and sharing photos is easy to do and often accompanied by step-by-step instructions. The Photo Book feature is particularly impressive, creating good layouts with no fuss and offering a couple layout tools similar to what one would find in InDesign: Arrange, Align and Distribute. The application does most of the work anyway, so a robust layout interface isn’t really necessary, and if a user wants to get more creative I suggest Adobe PageMaker or Apple’s Pages.

I am also impressed with the Online Gallery feature: there are a lot of very cool templates, some of which have great interactivity and animations. iWeb got some buzz as an application with cool templates for photo galleries, but Photoshop Elements has some great ones too. I haven’t seen iWeb, but I think it would be hard-pressed to compete against Photoshop Elements. Even Photoshop and Lightroom could use these templates to improve their own gallery selections.

Premiere Elements

The ease of use that has been perfected in Photoshop Elements is also in Premiere Elements. This application has a built-in Organizer that has a few less features than the Photoshop Elements Organizer (can’t hide/show individual items, no Find Faces For Tagging features, no map, no thumbnail size controls, among others). Some of these features show up elsewhere in Premiere Elements (Quick Share is in the Tasks panel), while others make sense for photography but not for video, while others may show up in future releases. Since the two applications are designed to work together, I’d use the Photoshop Elements Organizer to manage media for both applications.

Anyway, back to Premiere Elements’ features: the Get Media pane makes it easy to pull media from a digital camera or camcorder, files or the Internet, and the packaged software also ships with a cheat card to help users hook up their media devices and get the media. Creating movies is pretty easy, implementing the drag-and-drop method found in Premiere CS3, iMovie and many other video applications. There’s also various themes, effects and transitions that make it easier to clean up and polish video, which I think is vital for consumer and prosumer users who don’t necessarily have camera costing multiple thousands of dollars. Along with the robust video tweaking, I wish Premiere Elements offered some sound editing and tweaking as well: I know from my experience that Soundbooth was vital for cleaning up the audio that came from my camcorder, the same as Premiere was vital for cleaning up the video. Premiere Elements has strong video features but audio is only lightly covered with an audio mixer/equalizer. Audio presets would be most helpful.

Premiere Elements does a better job of creating menus than working with audio: 12 very good templates are available, and you can always pull images and media into your menu to customize it. Note that all menus must start with a template of some kind, so there’s no working from scratch the way you can with Encore CS3. For more consumer and prosumer video users this will work out just fine. Sharing video is also easy, with simple options from DVD burning to exporting for mobile phones to uploading video to YouTube.com or other Web sites. These features are easy to use and robust enough for most users, but I can see some users growing out of this very quickly. The disk-burning settings are adequate but relatively meager, and not well-explained. Photoshop Elements does a great job of making advanced features accessible for users who want them, but Premiere Elements could improve in this regard. The application is a bit younger so I expect it to be improved to Photoshop Elements’ level by the time it reaches version 6.

Integration between the two applications is good. In Premiere Elements, you can “freeze” a frame and send it to Photoshop Elements for tweaking or retouching. Unfortunately the two applications’ tools and features are foreign to the other: no “Photoshopping” video or anything like that (not that it’s really needed, thanks to Premiere Elements’ many effects). I think there’s some real opportunities for these two applications to work together more closely, but Premiere Elements is relatively new and it deserves time to grow its branches into Photoshop Elements. Anyone who wants to create both photography and video would love this bundle: the applications by themselves provide lots of value and power, and the integration they provide side-by-side offer some unique features.

Performance

One of the touted features of this new bundle is improved performance. I haven’t worked with the previous versions so I can’t compare the two, but I found performance with these two applications to be shaky sometimes. Photoshop Elements performed well, with no major speed issues though intensive tasks seemed to take some time to initialize (loading images in the Edit screen, generating photo book layouts). Premiere Elements performed markedly worse: stringing four large clips into a single video project took a good deal of time to process, and sometimes I wasn’t sure if the application was working on inserting a clip or frozen in some way. I got the task done but I had to wonder if my system was inadequate. For the record, I’m running a MacBook Pro with maximum RAM and processor speed, though I am also running these applications in a virtual Windows environment. I’m not sure if this is a factor in the performance hit, but Photoshop Elements works smoothly so I have to conclude Premiere Elements just had a tough time working with my large clips. Users shooting small video clips should not have a problem, but HD users or those shooting lots of footage may want to look at upgrading to Premiere CS3.

One more thing about the help pages: over the course of the review I learned the Help files that ship with the software are not as thorough as the online Help pages on Adobe.com. There were a few features I couldn’t find in the application’s Help pages that were found online. For reference, here’s the links to help for [16] Photoshop Elements and [17] Premiere Elements.

Conclusion

Reviewing this bundle was a real joy, because I’m happy to see first-hand how easy and fun it can be for first-time photographers and videographers to make great work. I remember the thrills I got when I first got my hands on SuperPaint and Canvas, and I’m sure there will be some 15-year-olds who go on to be creative professionals because of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. At the same time, this bundle is just right for adults who are getting into photos and video for the first time, or who want to print their photos without going to Wal-Mart and convert some cherished home movies to DVD.

Photoshop Elements
[18] Adobe Systems
$99.99/$79.99 upgrade
$149.99 bundled with Premiere Elements/$119.99 bundle upgrade
Rating: 9/10

Premiere Elements
[18] Adobe Systems
$99.99/$79.99 upgrade
$149.99 bundled with Photoshop Elements/$119.99 bundle upgrade
Rating: 8/10