Photoshop & Premiere Elements 7 product reviews

The Photoshop and Premiere Elements 7 package is a good, compact bundle, with both programs interacting with the other and making organization of files easy and, dare I say, fun!

I found myself spending hours in the 'organize' tab in Photoshop just tagging my photos with all these different custom tags I knew would make finding them again a lot easier.

It is a nice interface with big happy looking buttons and Adobe have made it very easy to do the things that most people would want to do to their photos (or in their films). There is red-eye remover, lighting and colour adjusters, fun effects to play with and most of the traditional filters from previous versions of Photoshop. You can even load custom brushes for those special painting effects you've been longing to play with.

The only things I have actually noticed missing from Photoshop Elements compared with the full Photoshop product is the ability to have layers grouped into folders and sub-folders. Oh, and where is my pen tool?!?! I suppose I can understand Adobe thinking that it was too complicated to explain how to use the pen tool (the documentation supporting Photoshop was somewhat minimal) but still! *sigh*

If you are in any way a fan of the pen tool then this version of Photoshop is not for you. Otherwise, it is perfect, brilliant and.... so much cheaper!

As for Premiere. Wow. For a start, nice documentation. Somewhat dwarfs the Photoshop quick start guide, but it is thorough and easy to follow. The program itself is also fairly intuitive but far more powerful than the likes of iMovie or MovieMaker.

The import system is far easier to navigate than more high end programs - it actually seems that plug-and-play really works for Premiere Elements. I also love how the program will automatically separate scenes for you based on where you stopped and started the camera... AND it can work out which scenes were blurry, out of focus etc and tag them with that before you get started (major time saver)... then again, the time it takes to process that (on my computer at least) sent me off for an hour to do something else.

I also really love the way they have made it really easy to burn your own DVDs or upload to YouTube. Everything really is crammed into one neat little package.

For all my ravings, there are a couple of down sides to Premiere Elements. I took a while to work out where my working files were being kept (sometimes tabs are just too helpful!) And it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out how to add text to a scene (down the bottom of the play window is a little 'T' I somehow overlooked). Then I got really confused as to how to edit the text such that it changed with time. (The manual did not seem to have anticipated me wanting to do something so unconventional).

The other strange thing was that Premiere kept freezing... well twice anyway. I resolved not to have any other software running simultaneously which seemed to help, but it was kind of annoying.

I still think that this suite is perfect for anyone who's looking for home video and photo editing. I was able to do a lot more than I expected in both Photoshop and Premiere Elements... and if it wasn't for the damn pen tool... well I wouldn't have noticed the difference.