Customer Ratings & Reviews

Pros -Large number of transitions, filters, music, and slides included -Large number of options for import and export -Download option for computers which do not have an optical drive -Integrated options to export to Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo Cons -No touchscreen options -Requires an Adobe account to activate instead of just using the Windows Store -Help is very limited and buried even though it is targeted at home users -Unstable and periodically crashes -Slow to process even with a powerful computer and smaller videos -Editing flow is inconsistent. Buttons change functions at odd times -No Blu-Ray support -No 4K export support for YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo -No support for importing media from Google Photos, OneDrive, or iCloud -Application launcher screen doesn’t open an older version of Photoshop Elements even if you have it -Application launcher screen just adds extra startup time to an already slow program Adobe Premier Elements 2018 is the latest in gradual evolution in Adobe’s video editing software directed at home users and prosumers. Premier Elements offers the core functionality of the professional products but tries to keep complexity down by cutting out less consumer-friendly features and by keeping the price down. Adobe has made conservative changes to the product each year so overall the product has changed little over the years. You still purchase it on CD although a download option is now available even if you purchase the disk version. Although this change comes a big late as quite a few devices have omitted an optical drive for years it is nice to see the change made. Oddly, Premier Elements is not available via the Windows Store even though it’s companion, Photoshop Elements, has been available since for some time. Having the software available via the Windows Store makes it easier to find, buy, install, and move because you would already have your Windows Store Account the moment you configured Windows and a separate Adobe account wouldn’t be required. Moving licenses and tracking them would also be easier this way. Premier Elements 2018 is a capable program albeit dated in design. It starts with a splash screen and a launcher screen as was the rage back around 2007 and showing every module as it loads as if even seasoned application users be able to do anything with the information if the application failed to launch. On launch you are greeted with a launcher screen that offers options to start a photo editor, organizer, and video editor. Besides adding unnecessary steps instead of allowing one to launch directly to a program, it also serves to confuse and slow things down particularly if you have purchased Elements and Premier in separate years. The launcher only launches the same version of the application it came with. This means if you are like a lot of people and purchase Elements one year and Premier another to spread out the costs you will have one launcher that launches Elements but fails to launch Premier and another that launches Premier but not Elements. A better solution would be simply to allow the shortcuts to open the corresponding application directly. There is an option to set a default program to start when opening the launcher but if you are not careful choosing you could end up conceivably having the Premier 2018 launcher trying to open instead Photoshop Elements. Once set, there is no clear way to reset or change this option either. Another aspect of the dated feel is how long it takes to launch Premier even on a modern fast computer. Videos editors on Smartphones and Tablets somehow manage to launch offering the lions share of features of Premier but without the 6-10 launch time required on a Core i5 rig with an SSD. It is hard to say if it is lack of optimization or just usage of old concepts, but younger generations will find the multiple steps and lag unacceptable. Design concepts aside, Premier Elements is very capable for the price point. It offers a confusing array of options and has a basic and advanced mode. Unfortunately, the interface does little in the easy mode to make things easy. Once you are in the program, you are greeted with another launcher, in this case a wizard, offering options such Add Media or Create a Template Based Project. Once you start creating a project you are greeted with what feels like a near endless supply of options. Included are options for transitions, film effects, audio tracks, title screens, menu options, and various graphics that work much like stickers. Included are some smart tools such as Smart Trim which can look through video for the options such as people or action or a mix to find the best moments in the video to save you time. The timeline allows you to add media both through the standard interface or drag and drop. Although very capable, the interface is mainly where Premier Elements starts to fall apart. Sometimes when working with a project, even on a modest project on a powerful machine, Premier crashes without any signs of what the error was. There is an feature turned on by default. It auto saves the project ever 15 minutes. A 5-minute autosave would be more appropriate but the problem is that sometimes, particularly if you have not saved the project manually at least once, the autosave feature fails when it crashes, and all work is lost. When adding and manipulating media the interface doesn’t always work as expected. When adding slides to a project, sometimes it adds them to the primary video timeline where other times it creates another video track and adds them to that track. The process seems random as adding the same type of slide in two different parts can yield different results. Another exactly is right click is a standard way to find options for an item Windows programs but in some parts of Premier the right click works as expected whereas other areas require a double click. Some of these seems like more polish is needed but some might be due to lack of experience. Professional tools often require training by third parties to fully utilize but with consumer products you expect the product to include ample training to have a firm grasp of the product’s use. Unfortunately, while Premier Elements does include some tutorials the number and scope is limited compared to the functionality of the product. It is great to offer so many features for what is essentially targeted at consumers and prosumers, but it really is lacking in documentation in training. If there is more training somewhere, it doesn’t make it clear. Once you have a grasp of the basics of Premier Elements it is easy to make an attractive video. Importing videos from devices is easy and if you have done it on any Windows computer the process is standard. A tool to import media from more modern sources such as Google Photos, OneDrive, or iCloud would be a nice addition as more and more people use their smartphones to take videos over traditional video cameras. Export is a different story. The standard options are available to export the video to optical disk or hard drive where you can set the options but along with this are options to export to YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo. Unfortunately, 4K options aren’t available for any and Blu-Ray support is absent. This seems an odd omission for 2017/2018. If where hoping to use your 2-in-1 Windows device which are the most popular in recent years, expect touchscreen support to be poor. Following the theme of feeling powerful but dated, don’t expect to use the touchscreen on your device to be of much help as everything is small and designed for use with a mouse and keyboard. Overall, Premier Elements is a powerful and affordable tool if you can get past the dated design, periodic instability, lack of tutorials, and just the overall lack of polish. It quite possibly offers the widest array of features for the price point and admittedly much of the same criticism of Premier Elements could be made against any video editing tool in the same class. If Adobe took more risks and put effort into modernizing and polishing the application this could be the go to tool for any consumer, prosumer, or potentially a budget minded/new professional. If you want the features Premier Elements 2018 offers can overlook the downsides you will find it should serve you well.

The user interface for Adobe Premiere Elements 2018 is very user-friendly and intuitive - and the features are extensive. Premier offers a variety of guided tours of basic editing - not tutorials, but a little screen that guides you through the appropriate mousing sequences necessary to achieve many basic edits. A few runs through some of the basics really gives you the feel for how the software is designed to assist you. Most of my video comes from a Sony ActionCam and a Bird Photo Booth Cam- all short single-action shots that need only basic editing. But I have been using a variety of free tools to treat my raw footage and none of those tools has been easy to use and I have never been satisfied with the results. But starting with a short video in Premiere Elements, I was able to get completely comfortable editing and adapting videos in about an hour: selecting excerpts, adjusting color and contrast, haze reduction (wow), reversing the lens distortion from the fisheye lenses on both action cameras (a feature that is new in this 2018 version), and exporting stills and GIF’s. Most of the features are drag-and-drop and work just like filters or adjustments for still photographs (that are simply applied to video) - all the features that I tried work beautifully and quickly. The algorithms are astonishingly fast - the first time I tried an adjustment, I thought the program was being unresponsive because I got no “Rendering” notice (because it was rendered immediately). Adobe really put a lot of thought into some of their more aggressive features like video stabilization, increasing/decreasing timeline speed, and the face detection for their pan-and-zoom feature. This is an amazing package - and I think it is an indispensable new companion for my action cameras.

The Adobe Premiere Elements 2018 has good video editing software that comes bundled with a photo organizer. The software itself is very large (3.3GB) and takes time to install however does run smoothly on my Windows 10 machine. I had to remove 1 star due to Adobe wanting you to pay an additional $80 to unlock all the tools to access the photo editing portion. It is unfortunate as there are competitors that include a photo editor with the photo organizer around the same price. Installation - The software is very large and will take time to install, however the walk through steps are very easy to follow. You are provided an option to install Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018 trial but will have to pay after expiration. I chose to only install the Adobe Premiere Elements as I do not wish to pay the additional $80 to unlock all the features at this time. Software - The software comes with 3 modes, Video Editor, Photo Organizer, and Photo Editor (Trial). They are easy to select and switch between them through the Adobe Premier Elements splash screen. I did not purchase the Photo Editor for the additional $80 at this time so my review will be limited to the Video Editor / Photo Organizer Modes Video Editor - The Video Editing software tools are easy to use and provide an additional option to go into "expert" mode once you become more comfortable with editing. The tools make it easy to clip the video and add audio along with alot of extras that could be added to the track. The layout is easy to see and navigate to the most common tools you use with toolbar customization. Another nice feature is the automated option to help clean up the video. It is sometimes a hit or miss depending on the quality of the raw footage itself but a nice feature to have. Photo Organizer - The Photo Organizer software is great for managing large amount of pictures with very accurate facial recognition along with fun slideshow tools. Once you point the software to the location that contains all your pictures it automatically sorts them with facial recognition for easy access. The tool also allows for easy modification in-case any of the faces should not be related. The slideshow tools allow you to create a slideshow and include fade / music with it. There are alot of option you can use for the slideshow and easy to swap out pictures where needed. This is a wonderful alternative for picture facial recognition / Picture sorting to keep pictures on the local machine instead of having to use a cloud service. Elements Live (eLive) and Guided - There is an online option called eLive that provides wonderful how to's and ideas shared among the community within the software. The eLive is accessible through both the Organizer and Video Editor Modes. If you do not wish to be online there is an offline assistance options called Guided. The Guided option is more limited on the how-to's you can learn from however is still a great resource if internet connection is a problem. Overall this is a wonderful product to have that just misses the mark due to charging an additional fee to unlock the Photo Editor. If that was included this would have been the perfect , well rounded software that fulfills both Photo and Video editing.

I have been making YouTube videos for a little while now, mostly using Premiere Elements 15. I was still learning the ins and outs of that version when I got this newer version. The 2018 version is as good as the last version, with mostly the same interface, plus it adds a few new features. Adding content and cutting scenes, adding text, graphics and music is pretty easy after a bit of practice. I haven't had too much luck using any of their "fix" items, like shake reduction or color correction. Maybe those are better used with photos and slideshows, I don't know. I haven't found their online help to be very useful to me, but there are plenty of people out there to show how to use various features if you do simple internet searches. The tools are there to make really good videos and photo slide shows with this software. Video editing puts a pretty heavy load on a computer, so make sure you have decent computer specs unless you want to be waiting for things to happen for long amounts of time. When you're ready to share, you have the option to share directly to social media, which is a really nice feature. If you're a beginner or intermediate video and/or photo editor, I would recommend this product. I can't speak for the pros because I am not one myself, but it gets the job done for me and I like that.

I own Photoshop CC 2018 and it cost about $110 a year to keep it up to date. I just bought a drone & a GoPro, so I needed something beyond the basic programs that come with the Drone & GoPro. To purchase the video component for PhotoShop CC2018, was $20 per month I didn't need anything that elaborate. This program seems "just right". Not so simple it is almost useless, but not so complicated one needs a cinematography degree. This fits right in the middle. Has lots of good features and one can produce a very professional looking movie with out a lot of effort.

I had been using Windows Moviemaker for my YouTube channel videos but it kept crashing so I bought the Adobe Premiere Elements 2018. It has a lot of features that I like and the video I just put together with the software worked great. Like anything, there's a learning curve & that's what I'm still working on. I only gave it 4 stars because there were actually elements in moviemaker that I really liked that are missing from this. Overall it does the job and it will be the only program that I'll be using for my YouTube channel.

I upgraded to Premiere Elements 18 from 15. There are a lot of new features in this one that make it a very nice upgrade.

Works wonderfully and doesn't exactly what it was intended for which is editing YouTube content.

This is a really good software program, especially since you don't have to pay monthly or yearly for it!

I bought this because i've always wanted to make YouTube videos but editing software is always so expensive. It's pretty good, I did have problems installing it, but they may just have been specific to me.

This is my review of Adobe’s Premiere Elements 18, the newest video editor put out by Adobe. It is aimed at the family-oriented users who enjoy sharing with friends, family and social media acquaintances, as well as perhaps others who are interested in getting started in video editing and either do not have the interest or the finances to use Adobe’s Premiere Pro or Lightroom. There is a portion of Elements Premiere 18 called the Organizer which is included in both Elements 18 and Premiere Elements 18. The Organizer is the foundation for locating, selecting, and searching your photo collection for the best shots to edit, share, or create a slideshow. It also does a very fast job of importing your photos into the “Library.” I found the “Auto Curate” feature of the Organizer is very useful. It analyzes photos for quality parameters like composition, exposure, focus, and faces, choosing just a small fraction among potentially thousands of images. A slider lets you dictate how many photos you want to include in the results. The app’s Smart Tag feature, introduced last year, helps Auto Curate identify image content. Ease of use is the trademark of the Slideshow tool, which works in concert with Auto Curate to automatically select the best shots, letting you choose from among several built-in animated themes and soundtracks. You can customize slideshows with your own soundtracks from iTunes, add captions to the images, rearrange slide order, or import additional images and videos. It takes just a few clicks and a few minutes to pump out a sharable slideshow. Premiere Elements puts the Organizer’s Auto Curate—a headlining feature for the new Elements package—to good use with its new features, Candid Moments and Smart Trim. The feature also supports an overhaul of the Slideshow tool, which turns out a template-driven animated visual within minutes for sharing on social media. Looking at the “Candid Moments“ feature, sometimes you just want to showcase a single frame from a video, but to do that you must takr the time to go through a movie to locate and select those frames. Or you can let Premiere Elements’ new “Candid Moments” tool do it for you. This feature is designed to do automatically what you would otherwise do visually, which is trudge through your footage for the best single shots. Time is a big issue for most of us today and “Candid Moments” makes the process easier and faster. After you review and approve the app’s still choices, you can add to or subtract from the auto selections and Premiere Elements places the images into a separate folder. This saved a ton of time for me. Another feature I find quite helpful is “Smart Trim” tool. Almost all videos have excess boring footage that adds nothing to the production or message except excessive length, but it’s a tough manual process to clean up all of the dull instances throughout a clip. That’s where Premiere Elements’ new Smart Trim feature comes in, using intelligent analysis to scan content and determine what can be removed without compromising the overall contextual message. You can assist by customizing the algorithm to look for people, action, or both, and extract the minimum or maximum amount from the final version. The feature maintains flexibility by letting you easily add footage back into the movie right on the timeline without a lot of tedious snipping and trimming. The program automatically assembles all the clips with transitions into a final product, for quick, no-fuss posting on social media. The tool worked well with casual videos, especially those without a defined soundtrack, as opposed to voice narratives, demos, or musical performances where, despite the transitions, cuts sounded a lot less subtle. One thing that makes Premiere Elements special is the “Guided Edits” feature. Guided Edits are the app’s extremely popular step-by-step recipes for how to create specific special effects and actions with both photos and videos. “Animated Social Posts” is like a storytelling tool. It lets you apply customizable static or animated text effects to a short video to quickly create social media messages. Quite a variety of templates are available in categories like Decorative, Geometric, Formal, and Fun. You just need to choose one, set the start and end points for the animation, and type in a stylized message. There’s no complexity to the process and the results can be stunning. “Freeze frames with motion titles,” another guided edit feature lets you emphasize parts of your video by freezing a frame and then adding a motion title. Just specify which frame you want to use while the guide takes you through some easy steps. “Bounce-Back Effect” is yet another guide. You’ve most likely seen animation effects where some subject moves in a given direction and then appears to repeat the same action again and again in a loop. It could be a clip of a cat or a dog, as an example, jumping up onto a bed. Then the cat or dog appears to jump backwards and then back up again. Now, Adobe has come up with a technique that does something similar with a few customizable steps to create a sharable short video. Next up is “Fix Action Cam Footage.” This guide is designed to fix fisheye lens distortions from GoPro and similar cameras as well as trim and correct color. The edit sequence first trims the fat off of your video to distill it down to the best footage. From there, you apply the Lens Distortion effect, adjusting the Curvature slider until the video looks in perspective. The last step is color correcting the entire clip, and you’re in business. Or you can just trim and color correct the video yourself and use the Lens Distortion effect on its own. It does improve GoPro footage, but it is very intensive and a more modern CPU will probably handle the process more efficiently than an older computer might. But, either way, it works. One thing that may be important to some and perhaps not to most is the fact that Premiere Elements cannot handle H.265. It is a relatively new, highly compressed video format that Apple’s iMovie can handle. So, I’m not so sure that most folks would not be interested in it. Adobe has yet to adopt it for Premiere Elements. Thus, owners of iPhone 7 and later will have to use the Camera app’s Most Compatible setting so that their files can be viewed and edited on the desktop in Premiere Elements. Adobe apparently assumes that their target market has no interest in 360-degree film editing. 360-degree cameras are coming down in price and they are becoming quite popular. In closing I have to say that I like Adobe products. I think that it is great that they offer a standalone editing software that meets the needs of the average consumer. It is pretty easy to use and I had no issues at all loading on my Windows 10 computers. After discontinuing Lightroom and Photoshop as standalone products Adobe has maintained a foothold in the Video editing marketplace. I must give it 5 stars even though they leave out H265 and 360-degree editing. It is fast enough and thorough enough for the average consumer and it is reasonably priced.

This is the best video editing software I have ever seen! I’m able to do so many things and it is extremely user-friendly. Would highly recommend to anyone new to editing or experienced.

This software is amazing for editing videos. Great for YouTubers. It is beneficial to watch all of the tutorial videos to learn about all the features the software has to offer.

Use this program monthly for helping with video tutorials. Might need to upgrade this year but for past two years it has been perfect

Wow had so many issues initially when using this product. It’s great you get so many features/applications with the softyware but beware this isn’t premiere Pro Cc it’s elements so it’s quite different. When editing in 4K my Laptop experienced extreme lag which made it quite time consuming to edit. I would recommend using this software on a desktop vs laptop.

was able to edit all my kids sports videos right out of the box you do not have to be a professional

Don’t have too much experience with this product yet, but so far it has been easy enough to navigate.

Using this product to converts home videos on DVD to create copies. Overall satisfaction good.

Easy to use and learning tricks and tips on how to use it are even easier

This is an entry level movie editing software. Easy to learn and easy to make movies.