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Provides: Photoshop and Premiere for the hobbyist providing a lot of power with a simpler interface
Developer: Adobe
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5.8 or anything newer, Intel Mac, 3.4 GB storage space, 1 GB RAM (2 GB for HD video functions), Quicktime 7.2 or greater.
Retail Price: $99.99 for each or $139.99 for both. Add another $49.99 per year for the "Plus" account.
Pairing the range of features and capabilities of any application down to a core feature set is a challenge. To make that application easier to use is a separate challenge in itself. Adobe does a great job in shrinking one of these two applications down to size so that the hobbyist can take advantage of what the parent applications have to offer. This release of Elements 9 brings two new applications to the Mac market: Premier (the video application) and Organizer (the content explorer application). Both of these two are not new and are both well seasoned applications. What's new is that they are now available for the Mac. I find Photoshop Elements both powerful and easy to use, Premier Elements is very powerful and a great step up from iMovie, but with a very steep learning curve. If you are used to using Bridge, Organizer is a bit frustrating, but it has a lot of to offer, just in different ways.
You have a choice when purchasing these items, they are $99.99 each or $139.99 for both (look for discounts). If you get both, you get them as a grouped pair, not two separate packages. Installing is a bit curious because on the DVD you will find one installer for Pse and another for Pre. After installing one, that installer quits and you then have to restart the "other" installer to get the other product installed. Not too much coordination there. There are two disks for instillation. Both products are all on one but the 2nd disk holds all of the extra dynamic features for Premiere. What is especially WONDERFUL if you life in a mixed computer household is that the Elements boxes come with both Mac and PC installers. If your household is a mixed computer mess, don't let that hold you back from purchasing Elements. I only wish Adobe was so kind for the Suite purchasers.
For help and assistance, Adobe has provided a variety of approaches: The default Help goes to Adobe's "Community Help" which is a mixed blessing: on one hand you may get more up-to-date info because this is a live program populated by people who are not necessarily Adobe employees. On the other hand, there may or may not be any information on the topic you are looking for and/or there may be incorrect information because it is populated by people who are not necessarily Adobe employees. In addition I've found searches for help via the Community Help slower than simply doing searches on the web.
Meanwhile, around the applications are short little teasers for help (see the screenshot below) and a new little Adobe Air application will pops up and provide you options to view video or PDF help. This works mostly OK but one area that fails profoundly is you need to watch any videos the whole way through. If you click to pause the video to try what you just learned, when you come back to the video, you will be at the beginning with no way to fast forward to where you just were. Air is a Flash generated application by Adobe that are either great or a bit of a PIA. Here, the Air app is both great and a PIA. The other big failing has to do with not all of the help files are in fact available to you. For example, if you click on the specific Help offering below, you get the "PhotoshopdotcomeinspirationalBrowser" (yup, that's it's name) and you are told that to see this video you need to update to a paid help system at $50 extra per year.
Who do they think they are helping at that point?
My personal recommendation is to bring up the Adobe Help application (its icon will come up in the Dock as a white "i" against a blue background) and in the upper right hand corner you'll see a "View Help PDF (16MB)." If you click on this the PDF will load into the Help application. then on the left hand side you'll see an icon for a floppy disk. If you click on that you can save this PDF to your hard drive where you can look at it any time you want. This can be done for ALL of the Adobe applications, the Elements, the Creative Suite applications, and all others.
As mentioned in the Retail Price above, one can opt to pay into a "Adobe Plus" account for an extra $50 per year. Having the free Adobe account does provide to you a free 2 GB of online storage. The "Plus" version ups this to 20 GB of free storage and also provides extra tutorials, free templates and a variety of other goodies. The value of features like this are personal as some may like it a lot while other may not need or want the services. What I do not like is how some basic tutorials are only available in the Plus service.
And now, on to the software:
Organizer
If all you ever took was 2 or 3 photos, ever, there's be no need to ever require something to peruse through all your photos to look for just the one you wanted. It's not uncommon for me to take hundreds of photos a day when I'm traveling so the need to review and examine my photos is vital. I can't stop and open/close/open/close every photo I've got to look for the one I want to work with. Ever since Adobe's Creative Suite 2 there's been an application called Bridge to look at the photos and other files on our computers. I've been a big fan of Bridge from the start and was delighted that Photoshop Elements 8 included Bridge as part of the package. Things have changed with Elements 9: not only did Adobe release a Mac version of Premiere, but they also release a Mac version of Organizer, a product that's been around for a long time for the Elements applications, but only for the PC till now.
I do not know how long the Organizer application has been around, but it's not a new application. As such, it's an already established application with a variety of capabilities. Amusingly, it's porting from a PC application is blatantly in your face when you go to look for the Preferences: they are under the Edit menu (the default location for PCs) and not under the application's name on the left hand side of the menu (the default location for Macs). A curious oversight by Adobe.
Organizer is a modular application in that there are tabs that direct what you see. There are four tabs: Organize, Fix, Create, and Share. This follows a standard workflow that you organize your photos and/or videos, fix what needs to be fixed, create groups and perhaps artistic renditions of your work and then share them via social networks or sending to friends via email or the web.
Having worked and used Bridge for so many years, I did find working with Organizer a bit of a challenge. For example, I'm used to right-clicking on an image's thumbnail and selecting "show in Finder." Not here. I'm used to looking at a metadata panel to see some internal data about an image. For that you have to specially bring up a "Properties" floating panel. (Yes, shades of Windows.) So, accept that Organizer is a bit alien and just continue to work with it. It'll be OK.
Beside being a location to see all of your photos, Organizer has one of its main values as a place to store and FIND all of your files. Organizer is in fact, partly a DAM application (Digital Asset Management) For this, one of the things that Adobe has brought into Organizer is face recognition. I went into this feature with a lot of "oh yeah..." but was pleasantly surprised with the process and the results. I dumped a bunch of family photos into Organizer and initiated the facial recognition process. It starts off with showing you a bunch of already cropped facial images, some of which are in fact not faces, and asks you to identify who's who. Most of the faces were of completely different people. By that I mean that you are shown rows of different people and sometimes there might be a face in a row that is a different person or a new row of a person who's a younger version of someone already identified. And yes, some of the faces will be pets, they are also identified. Then it goes through a process of confirming that the people it thinks it knows are in fact the right people. This is done by agreeing that all of the people in a row are the same person. If someone else's face is in a row that they shouldn't be, you simple let Organizer know that and continue to go through the step-by-step process.
The value is that once you're done, you can click on a name in the Keywords region and suddenly the only photos you see in the main window are those with that person in the image. Click on a 2nd name and only those images with both of those people will be displayed. Overall I find that the auto-face recognition is both fun, addicting. and surprisingly accurate.
One of the big big differences between Bridge and Organizer is that if you want to make ANY adjustments in an image in Bridge, you need to bring the image into Photoshop. There are a variety of auto-image-correction features built into Organizer and for most people they will be completely satisfied with what's provided. Many of these auto-correction features already exist in Photoshop such as auto-color or auto-contrast. The only issue here is that any correction is an "all or nothing" operation. If you think that the auto-correction over did the correction, there's no way to dial it back as you can in Photoshop. It's sort of a smart sledgehammer approach to image correction.
If you open the image in Photoshop Elements you obtain some level of finesse and can make fine-tuning of an image's correction (or simply accept what you get). While an image is "being used" by PSE, the image has a band across it with a lock indicating that it's "checked out" from Organizer and is being used by another application.
As mentioned, within Organizer are four tabs on the upper right side: Organize, Fix, Create, and Share (as shown below). Organize lets you create new or locate previously made "Albums," Fix provides access to the previously mentioned photo fixes (no fixes are available for video or audio files), Create provides access to the various options shown below, and Share let's you send your final product(s) to Facebook, burn into CDs and DVDs, email, etc.
One issue that I had with Organizer's format for all this is that if you select one of these items, the view changes (that's OK by itself) but if you want to get back you have to search all over the place until you finally see a small, grey option on the bottom labeled "Cancel." While that does make sense, unless you know to look for it, it's difficult to find or see.
Among the features that do impress me include such actions as red eye fix. Red eye, is simply the reflection of the camera's flash against the back of the eye and into the lens. One easy way to prevent this is to have the flash as great a distance from the lens as possible. This is why professional photographers have their flash attached to some structure on their camera or use a remote flash. With almost all point-and-shoot cameras, this is not an option so red eye continues to exist. Up until now, all red eye correction required the user to select the region around the eye to help the application narrow down the possible issues and then correct the problem. However, with the face recognition available in PSE, there's no need for the user to point out to the application where the problem might be. There is an option to "Auto-fix red eye" in the Edit menu and in a few moments, it's done. Below is a before and after of the red eye fix.
Probably the biggest limitation I can find with Organizer is that there is no way to easily find your media on your computer from Organizer. Within Bridge, one can right-click on any item and one of the options in the contextual menu is "Reveal in Finder." If you need access to the original file, there it is. To do this in Organizer is very very different. No, not different, it's just impossible to do it directly. The closest I could come was to select "Folder Location" in the Display option in the upper right hand corner, this will display the folder tree on the left hand side of the Organizer's window. Then you can right-click on the folder that holds your media to the front in the Finder and then manually dig through that folder to find your media. This is just plain silly.
There's no doubt that Organizer is a nice place to easily and quickly view your images. For quickly fixing a number of images the corrections provided by Organizer are not bad and can be quite good. The interface is different from Bridge and is not adaptable. (In Bridge if you do not like where a panel is you can simply move it. In Organizer, where things are is where they are, done!)
Part of what you get with Elements 9 is 2 GB of storage for your photos, videos, etc. on Photoshop.com. This also lets you sink your images with multiple computers so that you always have all of your images at any time. If 2 GB is not enough, you can up that to 20 GB with the "Plus" account for an extra $50/year.
In short, if you are used to Bridge, you will find Organizer, a bit frustrating. What's good about it is how it helps you generate key words to use in finding your photos. It's face recognition is excellent (and I do wish that Bridge took a few lessons in this as well). Interacting with Organizer is strange because when I double-click on an item in Bridge, that item will open in its respective application. [I.e., if you double-click on an image, it will open in Photoshop. If you double-click on a PDF, it will open in Acrobat.] In Organizer, it will expand to full size view. If you want to open something into its respective application, you need to right-click the item and select which application you wish to open it into.
One of the "powers" of Organizer is that you can do basic image-improvements to an image without going near Photoshop Elements. That in itself, may make many people happy.
[No rating given because Organizer is provided for free with either Photoshop or Premiere Elements.]
Photoshop Elements 9
Pse, or Photoshop Elements, lets the novice user have access to the basic higher end Photoshop technology without most of the Photoshop level of expertise. This comes at a price, that being if your images are standard images, you will get great results. Really. Really really great results. But if there are any subtleties in your image that might require some finessing, Pse might end up rather frustrating to the user. However, if you are not likely to complain or be concerned about subtleties on those images, you will be delighted with the result and will praise Pse and be grateful you have it.
Either opening up an image directly into Pse or by right-clicking on an image in Organizer and selecting to open in Pre. If your image is a raw image (or if you right-click in Organizer and select that your JPEG be opened in ACR) it will open first in Adobe Camera Raw and if you chose to finesse the image a bit more in Pse, you can continue the editing process in Pse. While any image is being processed outside of Organizer, the image in Organizer displays a police-tape yellow banner with a lock on it. Once the image is no longer being adjusted out of Organizer, the banner and lock go away.
The good news about working with raw images in Pse is that you get to use the exact same Adobe Camera Raw engine that the full version of Photoshop uses. The "not" surprising news is that many of the features that Photoshop enjoys are simply missing in the Pse release of ACR. [To get a better taste of what can be done with the full version of ACR, see my review of the latest release here.] To see the differences between the available Tools and Panels, see the screenshots below.
Opening Pse now displays a cleaner look with more easily readable text as can be shown below (click on the image to see the full sized image). As in the past, the structure is modular so that you Edit an image, Create something with that image(s), and then Share what you've done. Because one of the whole purposes to Photoshop is editing and because the purpose of Pse is to make editing easier, Pse provides three different mechanisms to edit images: the Full approach, easier than doing the same thing in Photoshop, but still requires some thinking; the Quick approach, fewer tools and more clicking at this or at that, and finally the Guided approach: almost no tools but easy step-by-step editing.
The Guide approach is pretty much what it sounds like it should be, it presents a task for you to select and it guides you to the final desired result. One of the new features of Pse is now there are some special effects that you can apply to your images with usually good results. There are five effects, four of them are shown below. The process is mostly OK, but it's really hard to know how good these are for someone who's never done anything like this before. I think the steps are mostly very easy to follow. There is one more Guide that I do not show below called Perfect Portrait that leads you through the steps to take a person's photo and make all the necessary steps to make it look great.
The biggest problem with all of these guided steps is that it assumes that you have a reasonably good photo to start from. If, for example, you are starting from a photo of someone who had their back to an open sunny window, you can forget about turning that into a perfect portrait from the get go. Although it might be pedantic and painful, people need to be reminded that you can't shine poo-poo. A bad photo will never provide a great result. But the assumption that (any version of) Photoshop can fix anything may lead people to frustration and a lose of interest spark. I always wish that applications like these had a few videos demonstrating about how to take basic photos.
Probably the biggest new feature in Pse 9 are layer masks. Layer masks let you block certain regions and/or sections in an image to both hide or show what's underneath. If you look at the top part of the image below, you can see that I've selected the two workmen. When you have something selected and then generate a layer mask, anything that is selected is white and everything else is black. But I wanted to effect the background, not the workmen so I then "Inversed" the selection and then generated the layer mask. Now the workmen are black and everything else is white. As the saying goes, "black conceals while white reveals." I used the layer mask on an adjustment layer. Specifically I'm using a Hue, Saturation adjustment layer and I've dropped the saturation way down. So what I've got here is the adjustment layer effecting the layer below to have very low saturation. But I've got a layer mask saying that anything that is black should ignore whatever the adjustment layer is doing. That way the workmen are protected because the black is concealing the effects of the adjustment layer.
However, you can generate the black a variety of ways. The most common is simply painting with your brush with either black or white paint. So let's say you have a face and you want to sharpen just the eyes and lips leaving everything else not sharpened. Duplicate the face in a new layer, sharpen the duplicated face, add a layer mask (press the Option key to generate a black layer mask), now paint the eyes and lips with white paint to selectively display only the sharpened lips and eyes.
It is common for new features in Photoshop to filter their way down to Photoshop Elements. One of the few that did make the cut this time around was one iteration of Content Aware Fill. As it turns out the only place that CAF shows up was in the Spot Healing Brush Tool.
One dynamic that I LOVE in PSE is that after performing some image correction/enhancement in Pre, when you save the image the application defaults to providing an iteration of the image for saving. One of the big mantras in image processing/correction by professionals is that you never get rid of your original image. This is obvious when you think about it: each release of Photoshop provides more and better image correction/enhancement. Something that you may do a so-so job with this release of PSE could be fixed much better and much easier in the next version of PSE. If you replace your original image with it's limited-correction from PSE 9, you'll never know how well PSE 10 nay have done with that image if the original image no longer exists. By auto-renaming with a name that leave the original image intact, there's no problem or issue with going back to the original image. Yes this does require more storage space, but at the price of storage these days, you'd be a fool tell Aunt Jody that her ol' grey goose's photo can't be fixed using the newest features in Pse because you no longer have the original image.
In short Photoshop Elements 9 continues to provide excellent results with the least amount of learning curve. Anyone can walk up to this application and select a few commands and end up with (probably) a better image. Besides my comment earlier that people will still need to learn how to take a good photo before trying to "fix it in Photoshop," the user will still need to know why they are selecting Auto-color as opposed to Auto-contrast.
This last issue is one thing that I realized during while writing this review: if you are thinking about getting Photoshop Elements to start learning how to use Photoshop before you invest in purchasing Photoshop, this can be done, but do not expect miracles. Photoshop is about nuances so that any feature has controls to fine-tune and alter. Photoshop Elements is about global and fast fixing, subtleties are not really emphasized. On the other hand, now that Pse has layer masks, some of the nuances and higher level controls are beginning to become accessible. All in all though, for most people, that's all they want is provided in Photoshop Elements and they will be delighted.
Applelinks Rating:
Premiere Elements 9
Premiere, like Organizer, is not new, but it is new for Mac users since this is the first release of Premiere Elements for the Mac. Apparently Adobe finally felt that Mac users needed something more powerful than iMovie yet not so bewildering (and as expensive) as Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro. My first response to Adobe's actions here are "Yeahhh." But, be advised, just because this is an "Elements" application, it does not mean that the program is easy to use or learn. It isn't. There are many subtleties and nuances that are not necessarily easy to follow or logical to use. On the other hand, there are a lot of powerful features that make creating fun effects relatively easy to do with Pre, just get ready to figure out how to access the tools. Stepping into Pre is a bit of a challenge and rather frustrating for those not familiar with video in general or Pre in specific. Lastly, keep in mind that the Mac version doesn't have all the features that the PC version has.
When you first start up Pre 9, the issue is to figure out how to use Pre 9. That's not a strange comment because unless you have used Pre before, on Windows, or have used other video software, using Pre is a whole new ball game. And you can't really use iMovie as a base because it really isn't as sophisticated as Pre. Because of that, get ready to dig and hunt because there is surprisingly little amount of information out there including a dearth of videos at Adobe TV that shows how to use Premiere Elements 9. There are a number of videos for Pre Elements 8, mostly they do help since the interface is not all that different than 9, but still...
This is a surprisingly sad marketing lost opportunity. Not only should there be a number of videos for how to use Premiere, there should also be videos on how to use Premiere if you are coming from iMovie: "things that are the same" and "things that are different and why you should know and/or care." Ironically, one of the best places to find videos on how to use Premier Elements is YouTube. There are a number of excellent (e.g., Lynda.com) and some less excellent (no names here). If you are willing to pay for tutorials, Lynda.com is an easy suggestion.
So sadly, a lot of learning how to use Pre 9 is based on looking at Pre 8 videos, YouTube, vodpod, and digging through the PDF manual. Suffice to say, unless you purchase the Adobe Plus account, get ready to hack. [On the other hand, you can download a free 78 page PDF from ProDesignTools.com from this page. This free PDF taught me more than anything Adobe provided.]
The basic workspace is typical for video applications and is modular as shown below (click on the image to see a larger version). One of the areas that Adobe has improved upon is the appearance for the interface and looking at images of Pre 8, I have to agree that it's easier to see (and read) the text on the various interface elements now. Pre 8 had colored tabs and other issues that did not help the general interface. On the other hand, areas that had names before do not have those names now. For example, looking at previous versions of Pre, I see a Panel called Properties. That Panel does still exist, but the name "Properties" (on that panel) does not. So when you are told to go into the Properties Panel, you really do not know what to look for or where unless you knew already.
Probably the biggest area of improvement is the inclusion of a greater number of video types that can be brought in for processing and the fact that you can import them directly into Pre. In the past, one had to get the video content into the computer and then into Pre. Now, by hooking a USB cable from your video recorder to your Mac is pretty much all you need to do what you want. Besides traditional media, one can import media from DSLR cameras to Flip cameras, from DV to HDV, from Flip cameras to iPhone to AVCHD, from standard definition to high definition all can be brought into Pre 9. Videos from my iPhone came in just fine.
[Note: as just mentioned, the very popular "Flip" camera is among the cameras that can easily import into Pre, but be aware that in the middle of April (when I'm writing this article) the router company Cisco had purchased the parent company for Flip and has chosen to cancel Flip production.]
One new feature in Pre can be found underneath the main image viewing window off to the left: a choice between working with all of your components via a Sceneline or a Timeline. The advantage of the Sceneline is that it only shows a single thumbnail for an video section and does not display how long it is (in relation to any other sections) and is therefore easier for beginners to work with video. The advantage of using a Timeline is that one can have multiple items in layers working in the same scene since they occupy a single scene (with different time lines) at the same time. Thus, for example, one can have animations working at the same time as some video.
Similarly, another new feature is that if you bring in video from a variety of sources (SD, HD, etc.), it's possible that some of these are not compatible with each other. Pre will both display warnings and offer to fix the issues for you. That by itself is probably one of the strongest features in Pre 9. [Keep in mind that this only works if the first piece of media is the odd media and doesn't work if you have media that is mixed together.]
What is interesting when comparing Pse with Pre, the amount of hand-holding potentially provided with Pse that is completely nonexistent with Pre. For example, Pse provides a Guided assistance with editing that takes the user step-by-step through the process necessary to create some (potentially) sophisticated effects and results. Pre, not so much. Let me provide an example:
[Note: I have essentially no background in video at all. Thus, as I attempted to work with Pre, I was having to learn the program from the ground up. Thus, many of you with video experience will be amused by the following and those who's video experience rivals mine may be concerned that attempting to work with Pre might be more than they can muster. While the amusement might be justified, learning Pre is challenging (yes) but certainly not impossible. Just be ready for a bit of a learning curve.]
Among the great features provided by Pre is the ability to fix and alter both the audio and video tracks in a movie. This, as one would expect, is done in the Edit module seen in the upper right corner of the image above.
Any effects selected only affect the video section that is selected. By that I mean if you start off with three video clips on your timeline and only the middle one is selected, any effects you select will only effect that one selected video piece. The other two will not be changed in any way. So, if you click on one video portion and select the "Pastel Sketch" effect, once that scene ends that effect ends. By adding interspersing transitions and effects can create some very very impressive end results if handled properly. Needless to say, none of the effects are permanent to the original media so it's very safe to edit, observe, alter, and edit some more without any degradation to the original material.
As shown below, once in the Edit mode, one can click on the dropdown menu and select either a Video Effect, Audio, any of the Adobe generated Presets, any Presets you've created and saved, and lastly, any of the effects only available if you pay the extra $50/year. (I will assume that any effects you obtain from the Plus membership are not lost in your videos if you drop your Plus membership, but they may no longer be available from within your copy of Pre for future video work.)
If you select Video Effects, there is an option to narrow down the list by selecting which type of effects you wish to work with.
All of the Video effects are accompanied by a thumbnail that does give a visual hint of what the effect can do on an actual thumbnail of your video. Meanwhile, all of the Audio effects are only presented by a generic icon. If you select one and/or mouse over the effect, the only extra information you see in a popup is a reiteration of the name of the effect.
To apply any of the effects you can either drag the effect to the Monitor Panel, or that specific part of the media on the Timeline (or Sceneline), or you can click on the "Apply" button (lower right). Neither right-clicking or double-clicking does anything.
Amongst the challenges, particularly with the audio effects, is that there is no information about what any of them is and/or what it's for. What's desperately needed is a region on the screen and/or a popup that explains what you are mousing over. If you do not know what the audio effect "Highpass" does, there is no information or indication why you might want to use this or any information about what kind of audio is benefited by Highpass.
[Note: for the record, from the PDF Manual: The Highpass effect removes frequencies below the specified Cutoff frequency. Use it to reduce low-pitched noises and rumbles.]
Once you've applied an effect, the effect can be edited by clicking on the "Edit Effects" button seen on the bottom left or by selecting the Properties Panel from the Windows menu. This can be seen in the screenshot below. Again, there's no information about what this does, what the numbers mean, what the Bypass checkbox does, etc. By the way, when you are in Edit mode, you are in the infamous "Properties" Panel mentioned in the beginning of this section in the review. [Note: the Motion, Opacity, Volume, and Balance are default effects as part of any video scene.]
There are a number of other important buttons and features (such as accessing Keyframes) located in the region and I'm not going to explain them here. But again, I do want to point out how unhelpful this interface is for the beginner who has no clue about video editing in general and use of this software in specific.
As stated, part of the issue with this release is that there are features for the PC that are not available for the Mac. For example, the PC version has a plugin for SmartSound's Sonic Fire software. This lets you add royalty free music to your videos. What's interesting is that this software (SonicFire Pro 5) is available to Mac user from Roxio's Toast 11 Pro. If you add the 65 audio and video effects plus a variety of other features for PC only, there are slew of Windows only dynamics not available for Mac. This number does ignore some Windows only features such as the ability to open and process Windows' video and audio formats. While I do understand why it might not be possible to export media into a PC format, I see no reason why Pre cannot read PC format media. That implies that anyone who's converted from the PC to Mac platform cannot access their old media unless they've pre-converted it prior to transitioning.
Once your video is completed, you can generate complete scene chapters and containers for the whole video. If you are using iMovie, at this point you would need to switch over to iDVD.
With Pre, you do not need to switch to any application for sharing your video and once your video and/or DVD package is complete, you can then do the final switch within Pre and select Share your newly created media via Web DVD, Disk, Online, Mobile phones and players, to your computer's hard drive and even for recording to tape. For each of these exports, there is a bit of a wizard to walk you through the steps to get your media where you want it to be with as minimal of fuss as you could hope. In fact, as shown below (using YouTube as an example), the tools are there for you to retrieve your username, password, and even create an account if you do not have one.
It is this type of detail that is so welcome here and so missing elsewhere in this software.
In short, Premiere Elements can provide excellent video and can do much more than iMovie. Pre 9 is less challenging than Premiere Pro, but it's not as easy to work as it should. I find the lack of support tutorials profound and for anyone who knows iMovie will find essentially no support to make the transition to Pre. Although the PDF manual is available online, like ALL Adobe applications, it's complicated to access unless you already know the various secret handshakes required to download it to your computer. While I accept and understand Adobe's desire to have a "Plus" membership with extra features, options and high-end instructions, having basic tutorials hidden behind the Plus wall is just not acceptable. Before people can even begin to consider how to do fancy videos, they need to know how to use the basic level of the tool.
On one hand I'd like to rate this software very high for all of the things it can do and the level of sophistication it can bring. But on the other hand I want to rate it low because it doesn't deliver on its stated claim: that being a hobbyist version of the full Premiere Pro software. Lastly, there is the disappointment that the Mac version is rather crippled compared to the PC version. The Mac software needs to brought up to full PC strength. So, I coped out and gave it a 3. In reality it's worth much more and much less.
What Pre needs is a Guided mode just as exists in Pse. Lead people through adding text, placing keyframes, some animation. While the Sceneline is interesting and does simplify the visual clutter, Sceneline doesn't do all that much else. And above all else, provide the tutorials that are necessary for someone to get up to basic speed with the least amount of grief. The Adobe (Community) Help is pathetic and painfully slow and the PDF with much of the same information is tricky to access.
My expectations and hope is that by the next iteration of Premiere Elements, the number of features that are PC only will be dramatically lower, or even nonexistent. I also would expect that Pre is more user helpful and less aspects are hidden.
Applelinks Rating:
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
Tags: Hot Topics ď Reviews ď Audio/Video ď Graphics/Design ď
