Adobe Elements bundle - Photoshop Elements v6 and Premiere v4 product reviews

Designed for the beginner-to-intermediate users, this bundle looks to be basically a mini version of the Production Studio bundle. You build your still images in Photoshop Elements, and use Premiere Elements to stick them together with your movie footage, insert transitions and chop out the bits you don't want, then save it all out.
Having had a play older versions at a friend's place, I was keen to try these out, but I admit to some mixed feelings with what I came across. Photoshop Elements was stunning, with improved usability and the workspaces are set up so that basic users are load'n'go, while advanced users can access the more powerful tools if they need to. Fixing red-eye is a simple 1-click job in most cases, while taking parts of 2 or more photos and merging them seamlessly into one composite image is a matter of a half an hour give-or-take.
One aspect I did notie was that v6 had a darker background than what I saw in v5 which made photos really stand out more. This turned out to be a bit of a bad thing actually because when I was adjusting the levels of some of my sunset photos and then viewed the final project on the TV, the photos were a lot darker than I wanted them because of the contrast during the adjustment of levels. Using a more middle-grey background, or allowing users to set their own background (as most versions of Photoshop let you do) so that when you adjust levels, you get a more exact match to what you want.
Premiere Elements proved to be a bit more, confrontational. First impressions were impressive, with plenty of features available, and easy to use. But keep in mind that 'easy' is a relative term. This is no point-click-publish application, video editing is a bit more than just that. However, this is far easier to grasp than the full package, even though it performs almost as well. The manual and support are minimal at best, so you would be well advised to seek reference books, join online forums and mailing lists, and get a bit of a support network built up before you really start to push this one towards its limits. If you run WindowsXP or Vista, you'll have a basic movie package already (Windows Movie Maker) but you will find this package is a more feature-filled toy to play with. With the same dark-grey background, I was still unable to get an accurate colour match, and it also made some text quite hard to read. This needs to be addressed, Adobe. On top of this, the DVD-burning software leaves something to be desired. After having a number of problems trying to get a valid disc burned, I gave up and simply saved out .vob files which I burned to disc using 'Nero BurningROM'. This proved to be a highly effective strategy. One other warning, if you have older versions of Premiere Elements, be aware that many of the DVD frames that are pre-loaded are different, so some templates won't work any more, and the catalogue is now in a different format, so any previous ones are now utterly useless. So much for backwards compatability, however some of these issues may be fixed with patches and updates in the (hopefully, near) future so be sure to keep your eyes on the Adobe website updates section for any new files to download.
To lighten things up a bit, a big 'plus' feature is the seamless integration with the online video service, YouTube. Just drag'n'drop in, or make, your movie, tell the software that it's final home is going to be YouTube and not only with the software render it in the best possible way, it will even log you in and upload it for you! (Note: Requires you to have an active YouTube account). Setting Keyframes is quite a simple task, and there are plenty of transitions and effects pre-loaded.
All in all, these are both stunning scaled-down versions of the full applications, with the ease of operation that make them accessible to the non-technical set, but with nearly all the power of the much higher-spec'd (and priced) versions. Even though they are tak-oriented, so have a lot of automated features and processes, there is still plenty of scope for creativity and individual 'flair'. One thing you REALLY need to be aware of is that Premiere Elements has different hardware requirements to Photoshop Elements. Premiere needs to run on systems that have CPU's that support the SSE2 Instruction Set. This basically knocks out anything below an Intel P4 or AMD-64 processor.