Adobe - Photoshop Elements & Premier Elements 2021 - Android, Apple iOS, Windows

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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 3 out of 5 stars

  Not Impressed with Mac Software

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  I used Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements on my 2017 MacBook Pro. I have not use Adobe Photoshop or Premiere before, and I have also not used Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements before. This was my first time using Adobe Photo and Video editing products. Photoshop Elements: Photoshop Elements seems to be a pretty decent program for editing photos. It has three methods for performing your edits: Quick, Guided, and Expert. Quick provides some very basic functions for editing. Guided steps you through the process of performing different edits such as object removal, rotating, sharpening, etc. Expert provides you with all of the options available within the program. I tested opening HEIC photos and editing them and this program had no issues with that. For 2021 software, this program does seem a bit dated. The interface is pretty boring, but the number of features seems to be pretty good and it does seem to work well. This software has a pretty decent number of features and also can help step you through how to use them. I think this is nice for beginners and those who are inexperienced in photo editing. From using this on my Mac and editing photos, the software performed well. I was not very familiar with using Photoshop software, and it was not very clear how to use some of the features in expert mode. The guided mode helped step me through some of the features and it has several that it can step you through. Overall, if you are looking for a fairly basic program to edit photos, this should be decent. I have used other photo editing programs that are more polished and in some ways more intuitive, but the guided feature here is pretty useful and straightforward. Premiere Elements: Premiere Elements was a big disappointment! I have used this same computer for video editing on iMovie which has worked well, but Premiere Elements did not work well at all! There was severe lag in premiere elements. My computer is not slow, and I can confirm this from my experience editing videos in iMovie. In Premiere Elements, I would click a setting or option or pause the video playing and it would take 2 or 3 seconds to respond. Regardless of features, the amount of lag and lack of optimization on this software makes it pretty much unusable! It would take forever to edit videos on this program, so for me, this makes it pretty useless. Beyond this, like Photoshop Elements, the interface looks dated. Additionally, for video editing, this program seems very basic and lacking in features. If you don’t know how to edit videos and just need software for very basic and minimal editing and have no experience doing so, this could work for you. Like Photoshop Elements, this has three methods for performing your edits: Quick, Guided, and Expert. Quick provides very simple and basic functionality. Guided steps you through how to use features like trimming clips and adding titles. Expert allows you to use all of the features available in the program, assuming you know how to use them. The lag I experienced may just be a Mac issue. This program seems very poorly optimized for MacOS and looking at the design, I would expect to see a program like this in Windows. It’s almost like this is a Windows program just being emulated to run on MacOS because of how laggy and slow it is. I definitely would not recommend Premiere Elements for Mac users! It may be better optimized and a fair option for Windows users, though. Conclusion: My thoughts are based on using this program on a Mac. The poor performance of Premiere Elements may just be an issue on Macs, so I would look to other reviews for comments on this if you plan to use this software on Windows. Photoshop Elements seems like a decent program. It has several features and capabilities and worked well on my machine. If you have very limited photo editing experience, you might find the guided options helpful and that might help to make the photo editing process easier to understand. I wasn’t impressed with this software, and personally prefer other photo editing programs I have used on my Mac, but if you are looking for something with guided steps or are a beginner with photo editing, this might work well for you. Premiere Elements was a HUGE disappointment. If you have a Mac, DO NOT buy Premiere Elements. The lag in this program was extremely annoying and made it very difficult to use. Do not waste your time or money on this if you have a Mac! This may perform fine on Windows computers, but I am not sure. If you need a basic video editor on Windows, this might work fine for you. It is pretty basic software, so don’t expect a lot of capabilities. It does have the guided feature which shows you how to use different editing features. This could be helpful on a Windows computer if you have no video editing experience and need to do some basic editing. Overall, I wasn't impressed with these programs and would not spend a lot on them. Photoshop Elements is decent and might work well for some use cases. Premiere Elements is horrible and pretty useless on the Mac. This may be different on Windows, but I would definitely not recommend Premiere Elements for Mac users!

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  Posted 5 years ago by Liam

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  It's Always a Pleasure to Use Quality Software

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  First a couple of installation observations. Both the Photoshop Elements 2021 and the Premiere Elements 2021 installation routines triggered untrusted software warnings forcing me to agree to installing untrusted software. I know genuine Adobe software can be trusted and you can to, but those warnings are probably not something Adobe should ignore. The downloads from Adobe are getting pretty big: Photoshop Elements 2021 Zipfile is 4.1 GB and the Premiere Elements 2021 Zipfile is 3.5 GB. Together they take up 15.7 GB of drive space when unzipped. The size is not really a problem, but you just need make sure you have much more than that available wherever it is you download and unzip the installation files. Don't target a drive that's cramped for space. Photoshop Elements 2021 is Adobe's new photo editing software for the consumer or home market. I've been enjoying each year's improvements to Photoshop Elements ever since I first received v15 back in 2016 and it nevers ceases to amaze me how smart this software is getting. I use it mostly to manipulate and improve photos I include in the email newsletters I create for a local charity that I volunteer with. It makes that task much easier. Anymore I find it difficult to improve upon the Auto functions when playing around with color, sharpen, cropping, and so on. For instance, when creating the photo collage "Spring_In_My_Orchard" that I uploaded for this review, I went with all of the recommended color enhancements and crops to the individual photos I took one April a few years back. When Photoshop Elements created the collage, it chose the simple layout you see in the final collage. I forced the software to try all the other layouts, but I rejected them all and went with the original choice made by Photoshop Elements 2021 because there was nothing better in my choices. I did use the new Perfect Landscape tool to add a bluer sky to the photo on the upper left which originally had a washed out white sky. And in that same photo I used the Spot Healing tool to remove an orchard deer fence from the near background. I was very pleased with my results. In the before and after photo called "Dog_Portrait", I used number of Photoshop Elements 2021 tools to transform the lucky backyard photo of one of our dogs on the left into the portrait-style image on the right. I was having so much fun creating this transformation that I can't really remember what all tools I used. But I love the results. The last photo I uploaded for this review "Old_Photo_Restored" was the before and after comparison of an old photo restoration I just did of my wife's grandfather on a portrait taken on his 19th birthday back in 1919. I used the Restore Old Photo tool found in the Guided-Special Edits. I played around with the Dust Removal, Sharpen, and Crop tools found there. I thought the results were amazing! She said it made a handsome man even more handsome. So, if you're like me and don't mind not being a genius graphics illustrator and in contrast are only interested in quick and pleasing results, you can't go wrong with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021. It really has been getting better with age and the decent price makes buying the annual fall releases almost painless. Premiere Elements 2021 is the new video editing software. Like I said above, I've been enjoying each year's improvements to Premiere Elements also. I'm not much of a video editor, yet I like learning about it by playing around with cellphone videos of family and Premiere Elements 2021 makes that easy to do. For this review I did some exploring with the Guided-Fun Edits to try expand my video editing and enhancing abilities past simple trimming, splitting, transitions, and text that I do for drone videos. While there is a lot of smart, guided adjustments and edits, I clearly I need to spend a lot more time studying the online tutorials to do justice to this very smart software. I'm looking forward to it. Bundled with the photo and video editing software is a tool called the Organizer. Basically, it does just as its name implies. It gathers together and organizes your photos and videos and makes them available to the two editing programs. It will also do automatic backups for you. As always, Adobe puts out a top-notch product. The 2021 versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements are no exception. I can highly recommend these two products once again without any reservations whatsoever. They are better than ever!

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  Posted 5 years ago by Steve62305

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Excellent software for home editing

  • Tech Insider Network Member
  • Top 1000 Contributor

  I was excited to use this software because I use a lot of photographs in my livestock business and knew I needed something better than the programs that come on PCs. I had used Adobe years ago and felt that I was overwhelmed with choices and terms I did not understand. This software gives you three levels of editing-- Quick, Guided and Expert. Using the Guided version shows me what the proposed change area is! In pictures! This is wonderful. I was able to quickly edited some photos and learn some new skills. The Guided portion allows me to expand my usage and graduate to the more Expert levels. Using the video editor, I was able to stitch together several video shorts of baby kids running and make a longer version, all while cutting out the bits where they ran outside the lens range. Perfect for me! On the photos I am attaching photos where I changed lighting, contrast and such (white goat with kids), cropped and took out a second goat and the big goat poops, while sharpening the highlights on a black goat, and then cutting a black goat out of one picture and placing him in a differnt background. I really find the Guided portion will make me a competent photo editor! I strongly recommend this product for anyone who needs to update and clarify photos, but not to the tiniest pixel but was afraid of a complicated program. This program is for you!

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  Posted 5 years ago by Aggieof83