See screenshots of all the new features in our Photoshop Elements 8 image gallery
(Credit: Adobe)
Time again for Adobe's annual update of its consumer photo- and video-editing applications, Photoshop Elements (Windows | Mac) and Premiere Elements (Windows only). We're up to version 8 now, and while there's no killer must-have new capability — unless you consider automatic sync across multiple computers — the two products still provide solid mass appeal for their respective markets.
As in the past, you can buy the pair together for AU$245, which is a far more attractive buy for video-editing shoppers than Photoshoppers, and in fact the combination makes quite a nice bundle for home videographers. Independently, they're AU$165 each.
After allowing the product to languish for a while, with version 8 Adobe brings the Mac version of Photoshop Elements up to parity with the Windows version and with the buzzy new features in iPhoto, including face recognition and geotagging/mapping. Unlike iPhoto, however, there's no direct upload to Facebook, though it supports a broader number of services, including Kodak EasyShare Gallery and Smugmug. Annoyingly, those choices are buried as More Options on the Share pane (likely because the interface decision was based on the technology used — implemented via an API instead of a core program code — rather than where the user will look for them).
Like most current facial recognition implementations, Adobe's is only moderately accurate. For instance, in many photos it correctly identifies one person, but didn't detect others and thought inanimate objects were faces. The batch detection and labelling where you confirm different faces in groups of selected images is better, but still a little clunky.
PSE also includes a version of Photoshop CS4's Content Aware Scaling, Adobe's implementation of seam-carving technology, called Recompose. Recompose sort of lets you selectively drop objects from a photo as you scale it down, preserving those elements that you designate as worth keeping.
Now that Adobe includes the Organizer with both products, it's been updated to handle video and audio files rather than just stills, which is nice, especially for Premiere Elements users. There's some more "Smarts" in the latest version of Premiere: SmartFix, which makes adjustments to perceived flaws detected by the Auto Analyzer (a feature introduced in the last version that parses and tags files for problems with shake, exposure, focus and so on); Smart Trim, which extracts clips based on similarly derived information; and SmartMix, which automatically fades voice and background audio tracks in and out depending upon your prioritisation.
If you want to take some creative risks, you can use the Motion Tracking, which lets you sync effects, text or graphics to objects in a scene or Effects Masking, which applies effects only to specific rectangular selections. (Unfortunately, we ran into technical difficulties with mix 'n' match betas on our system that prevented several features from working when we tried to create the walkthrough for Premiere.)
We're reserving judgement on performance, stability and quality of results (especially on Photoshop Elements' tricky Recompose tool) until we have final versions of the software. Since it's shipping now, that should be soon.
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