Adobe - Photoshop Elements 2023 & Premiere Elements 2023 - Mac OS, Windows

Just what I wanted the new version has so many add ons for editing. love it!!

Does not include options that I need to refine photos that I need for my photography

Summary: Mostly the same for returning customers with some new additions like every year. That is not a bad thing, just a much more refined software for a casual photo editor. Of note this year, extracting images from video adding effects that follow objects in videos, video stabilization, better color pop features, more video formats for export, filling of video borders, better hardware acceleration support, moving elements in photos, Apple M1 support, much better performance, and more. Pros: -Loads of new options -Great overall feature set -Good performance on PC Cons: -High DPI displays require some messing around for support -Learning curve if you are not familiar with prior versions -RAW not supported by default (requires plug in) -No HEIF / HEVC support in application Installation: For this downloadable version, I was provided with a registration key which was used to obtain a serial number. Save that number for future installations! After installing, I imported my photo library (a lengthy process between JPEG and RAW) and got started. Of note, it would not import 1000 photos and videos of mine since they were in HEIF / HEVC format. The link directs you to download the windows extension but that does not appear to affect the organizer if they are already installed. Photoshop: This is the one I use the most. I usually bounce between Elements and Lightroom as a photography hobbyist and it is great that they are always adding features to elements. My first impression was a minor frustration since my laptop has a resolution of 2560x1600. The DPI options in the settings are “automatic”, “100%” and “200%”. Unfortunately, 100% is too small and 200% is too large to the point where it is hard to get work done in the space allowed. After tinkering with system properties to force DPI settings, it appears the application provides the best setting at 100% or 200% so you will just need to see which one is better for you. After plugging it into a 4K monitor I was a bit happier 200% option. One thing I have always liked about elements is the options between “quick”, “guided” and “expert. Expert mode feels mostly like the full version of photoshop whereas there are the other two options to learn how to do certain projects with guided walkthroughs and demos. I mainly work in RAW so I was surprised that the software does not by default support it. You first must go to “help” and select to install the RAW plugin at the bottom of the menu. This will install “Adobe Photoshop Elements Add-on Utilities 2023”. Once opening a RAW file, there is a simple RAW editor that will pop up with the essentials such as lighting, color, noise reduction and so on. It works well to at least get you to the main processing. Other products might be better for the photo editing pipeline, but this software is great for cleaning up photos and various creative work creative work. I had fun messing with some of the AI features such as object removal, adjusting facial features and shake reduction. A few samples are posted into the review. Premier: I am relatively new when it comes to video editing, but this software has more than I need for any project. I often create slideshows, family montage videos of birthdays and simple projects for work. The software is great for simple edits with lots of video effects and transitions. Due to the time it takes to edit a video of quality, I did not get a lot of time in this review but here are some quick notes. Performance on a Ryzen 9 6000 series laptop with Radeon RX 6700s was good until you add filters, then the video stream is no longer real time and choppy. I noticed that the microphone is enabled for some reason when running the program. I did not dig too deep, but saw similar concerns in forums. This is a non-issue to me but somewhat strange and you might not care for it. Rending an 8-minute video with transitions and filters at 1080p took me about 9 minutes total. Once rendered, speed is great for further edits until exported. Testing the same video as a 4k export high quality 100Mbps MP4, it took about 25-26 minutes.

This is great for editing videos and pictures! I recommend! (:

I call these two Adobe products high-quality, smart software for the non-professional and have been using them for over seven years now, since 2015. Every year, I look forward to October when Adobe comes out with their next annual version with lots of interesting new features. The 2023 versions do not disappoint. I am a retired software developer who knows good software when he sees it. Adobe Elements: I use Adobe Elements to make our family photographs and my drone photos a little more interesting and visually pleasing. I also use it to restore old family photos and to help my wife with her genealogy interests. Since I'm retired and need something to do I also use Adobe Elements to prepare photos and images for upload to a local charity's website for whom I volunteer. I use Adobe Premier Elements, the video editing software, mostly to make my airborne drone videos a little more fun to view. Being self-taught, I'm no expert on photo and video editing. But if I can produce interesting photo and video media, you can to with this smart software. Like me, if you do not know how to do something, you can check the online Adobe tutorials or search through YouTube's hundreds of Adobe Elements videos for what you need to learn. You can do so much with this software and much of it in the Quick and Guided modes along with the Artistic and Classic effects in the Expert mode are done by point and click or click and drag. You can simply try various effects using drag-and-drop until you find something you like and is suitable for the photo that you editing. It's actually a lot of fun. For instance, you can use the Perfect Portrait tools found in the Guided mode to very easily improve the facial features in a portrait photo. You can take 10 years off your grandma by smoothing her skin just a little. She'll really appreciate that. You can fine-tune a person's facial features by removing blemishes, whitening their teeth, brightening their eyes, darkening their eyebrows, and even opening closed eyes in a photo. All by clicking a few buttons. And if that's not enough fun you can actually adjust their facial features by changing their lip dimensions, adjusting their eyes such as distance apart, size, width, and height. You can even adjust the shape of their face, nose, and the tilt of their head. And it's all done by clicking a few buttons and moving some sliders. And if you don't like what you did, you just undo it and try again. For this review, I made and uploaded a 4-panel collage using a nice portrait-style picture I recently took of a photogenic woman with a coral rose in her hair. I tried all the effects and chose these four: Seasons Effect, Shape Overlay Effect, Urban Grayscale Effect, and a Peek Through Overlay. I thought they all came out very nice and added something to the photograph. If you wanted to, you could make your own greeting cards with the Adobe Elements software. I uploaded a sample Thanksgiving card of a woman and a grandmother. I had never made a greeting card before with Adobe Elements and even though this card isn't perfect, I think it's a pretty good first attempt that didn't take more than 30 minutes to make the first time. Lastly, I spent several hours using Adobe Elements to restore an old family photo from 1977. It is an old GAF Instamatic picture of a mother pulling her two toddlers in a red wagon past an 1840s pioneer log cabin built on the Great Plains of North Dakota. The photograph had sustained some serious discoloration, staining, and burn damage over the last 45 years. Using a variety of tools provided in the Adobe Elements 2023 Expert mode, I was able to clean up, repair, rebuild, and completely restore this nearly 50-year-old print! I was actually amazed at at my results. You try something the first time and if it doesn't work you just hit Undo and try something different. Adobe Premiere Elements: I use the Adobe Premiere Elements 2023 video editing software for just the most basic types of video editing of my drone videos. Things Like trimming video clips to eliminate the boring stuff, splicing in other videos to make a movie, and adding professional looking transitions between my clips. The number and variety of transitions built into the Premier Elements software has increased by leaps and bounds since I first started using this video editing software back in 2015. Once again, this is done by simply drag-and-drop and if you don't like what you did just undo it and try different feature. There's plenty of basics offered besides clipping and splicing videos. You can add titles and narration and you can also fix brightness, color, contrast, shadows, and the highlights of your video. If you want to get fancy with your videos, which I have done with some drone videos, you can add slow-motion and fast motion effects and also time lapse or stop motion. It's all really pretty cool. Adobe has been adding more and more audio features to complement your videos. Drone videos normally have no sound because all you would hear would be the whining and screaming of the drone motors. Premier Elements now allows you to add a musical score to your video which makes a drone video a lot more interesting. For those who post on social media you can now spice up a photo or video with an animated motion title. Just a little something to make your post more interesting to stand out from the crowd. There's not a lot more to say about the 2023 version of Adobe's Elements & Premiere Elements other than I been using this software for over seven years and love it. I use it frequently and learn something every time I do. I don't think my photos and videos would be anywhere near as nice without it. As software goes it's not expensive and I can highly recommend it to anyone, from beginner to expert, who wants to add a little pizzazz to their family photos and videos!

I am not a professional photographer or a content creator but use my photographic and video background for both personal and business uses. I have never used the subscription-based Adobe Photoshop for photos or Premiere for videos, but I do understand how valuable they are to professionals and many amateurs. As the name implies, Photoshop and Premiere Elements contain many parts of the more complex Photoshop and Premiere subscription software and are designed for those of us who want and need to adjust, edit and present their photos and videos in a creative and personal manner. For me, there are more than enough features in Elements to meet all my editing, creative and organizational needs. This software is as complex as you want to make it and the creative possibilities are infinite. When you install and then open the software, you are presented with suggested projects and available features to adjust and organize your photos and videos. For example, you can make a slideshow, add effects, replace backgrounds and objects, and share photos and create videos for social media, or edit and save them to your own devices. When you buy this software, you install it by download or from media, and there is no periodic subscription to renew or pay. It is yours to use, subject to the license agreement. While you can easily use the guided projects which will help you learn the software, there is still a learning curve. I have used the software for several weeks and cannot count the number of features. Because my current needs have centered more around photos than videos, my experience with Premiere has been more limited. One feature in this software that I find incredibly useful is the Organizer. You name the various faces of family and friends in some photos, and it scans through your entire collection and groups the photos according to name. It’s amazing and very useful. The photo editor allows infinite adjustment of your pictures. Using Smart Fix allows the software to determine and suggest the changes. Or you can use the sliders to manually adjust exposure, lighting, color, balance or sharpness. You can remove entire objects from the photos, replace backgrounds, fix exposure and lighting mistakes, or add effects. It can be as simple as using one of the various wizards to guide you through the process, or you can use the numerous photo and video tools to manipulate the final project as you see fit. If you want to see how others use these products, there are numerous and detailed publications and a plethora of YouTube videos showing how this software can be used. The resources are extensive. I still have a lot of learning to do, but I’m having fun and really enjoying this software. I have it installed on a MacBook Air M1 with 8GB of RAM and a Dell Inspiron desktop with a Core i5 Intel processor and 8GB of RAM running Windows 11. The software runs fine on both machines.

The Adobe Photoshops and Premiere Elements package is great for anyone looking for quick adjustments and edits to photos as well as perform edits and create slideshows using both photography and video. First off, my biggest concern was the ability to edit RAW file images as that is primarily what I shoot. This was not an issue for Photoshop Premiere 2023 at all. I felt it handled it very well and had all the functions I use in some of Adobe's other photo editing software. You are able to adjust exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, detail, etc... You will want to do this when you open the RAW file when it first opens the file in Camera RAW. Upon first use when you try to open the file it will tell you that you need to install Camera Raw to open the file which you just OK and the software does the rest. After you make your adjustments in Camera RAW you hit open which brings you to Photoshop elements. In here you can further edit with the included filters and tools such as the eraser tool which allows you to remove lens dirt and other objects from the image by matching it with the background. As for the filters, I believe there is something for everyone to give your image a unique look. I personally am not a fan of all of the Artistic filters with the exception of Jazzy and my favorite of the bunch, Golden light. The other filters I feel try to hard to look like the image has brush strokes and my personal preference is I am not a fan but I am sure many may disagree otherwise I am sure they would have never been included. Overall, Photoshop Elements is a very simple tool to use and is an excellent tool for basic editing. As for Premiere Elements, another great tool to edit and create videos and slideshows. I found this very easy to use and pretty straight forward as I was able to quickly create a short slide show, using a couple of my images, adding some effects and to finish it off, was able to add background music. The effects are very simple to use. Simply select what you want and drag it to the tile you want to add that effect to or add it to multiple. Included music that can be added has a good selection of interesting and enjoyable songs. Only issue I initially had was saving my file to a playable format. I kept using save as which simply saved it as a Premiere project file. Took me a few to realize what I actually had to do was perform and export at which point it creates a playable MP4 file. I put together a quick slideshow from premiere which took me less than 5 minutes to do as I used unedited images of mine. I am attaching the slide show to this review if the file isn't too big. I am also including before and after photos of two of my images after editing in photoshop premiere. Overall, both Element products are great and extremely useful for the casual photographer, videographer, content creator, etc... I definitely recommend both to anyone looking to get creative with both their still and motion photography. You definitely can't go wrong here.

I recently switched to Adobe photoshop elements and premiere 2023 from a different software. I was able to speed up my content creation process with just a few clicks of a button. I am glad that I switched to using 2023 version to edit pics and videos for personal and business use as it took the guess work out of photo and video editing process. I got more creative with the new tools and features on website creation. It was perfect timing for the 2023 release as I was getting ready to print customized greeting cards for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Installation was quick, it took about 10 minutes to install the new software. The Photoshop elements automatically organized and grouped my pictures and videos into media, people, places, events, date, etc. and it also tagged the location of my pictures and videos. I like the location tagging feature as now I can browse the map to find the right pictures with ease. I can overlay pictures that blend with the background, replace backgrounds to suit the right occasion, etc. I love the pattern brush feature as I can now create special effects on the pictures with tons of options. The expert mode shows the sequence of changes I made to the pic which is perfect to go back and fix things after I get done with the changes. The best part of the Photoshop Elements is the collage template collection which has tons of options. I used to spend hours creating collages and now I just select the images and pick the template to create my greeting cards in seconds. I also tried the slide show option to add marketing content for my friend's website and it just took a few clicks to create the right content. The second-best thing I like is the "moving elements" under the enhance tab which is perfect for website creation or to animate few things by changing the background on still pictures. I can now directly post or share my content on social media or with elements web option from the software. There are also several lifelike backgrounds that you choose and add them to old pictures to give them a complete new look. I took my web content creating to a whole new level by adding animation to still pictures. This is perfect software to edit, create new content, and upload it instantly to social media in minutes. You can create special effects with the AI features in Adobe Premiere Elements which is a great tool to create content for digital marketing. I was able to create animation videos using a series of pictures for my website, change background settings on still pictures, etc. for digital marketing, etc. with just a few clicks. I highly recommend Photoshop Elements and Premiere 2023 if you want to auto organize your pictures and create amazing content in minutes. It has guided instructions on how to use the features to edit pictures and videos. Great tool for people who are into digital media creation. I just downloaded the mobile companion apps so I can create content on-the-go on my iPad.