Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 plus Adobe Premiere Elements
by Adobe
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Software Reviews of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 plus Adobe Premiere Elements
Customer Review: Simple, Easy, Intuitive -- What Else Could You Want?
Summary: 5 Stars
I am a pretty decent digital photographer/videographer. I take a lot of photos, film a lot of video of my one-year-old, and pretty much know my way around a computer. I've been using Adobe products for quite some time, and when I heard they were coming out with a all-in-one video/photo suite, I was intrigued since my Pinnacle Studio product really had some problems and I was getting frustrated. So, when I saw Amazon had this product available and I could transfer all of my Adobe Photoshop Album pics right into the new Elements program, I was sold. And I am sure glad I made the purchase.
First, the Elements feature. If you have tons of digital pictures on your hard drive and spend minutes looking for individual ones to print out, e-mail, etc., then this program will suit you perfectly. All of your digital pictures can be tagged (events, family, etc.), and then be "sub-tagged" for even more personalization. It's quick, easy, and efficient. Also, photos can be e-mailed easily with automatic compression and cool e-mail "themes." In addition, the program lets you simply take a photo and color-correct it with one mouse click, add neat effects, eliminate red-eye (the best on the market), use the "healing brush" (ingenious) to omit perfections, and even splice and create all sorts of interesting photo montages, calendars, slideshows -- you name it. Elements is a digital photo enthusiast's dream. It has never been easier to get your pictures organized, fix them all up, send them to your family, and archive them on a CD/DVD or create an interesting slideshow, complete with music and animated fonts.
This brings us to Premiere, the video portion of the suite. As long as you have a digital video camera with IEEE 1394 connection ("firewire"), it's simple to get going. I transfered about 30 minutes of raw video, added music, did extensive edits and burned a DVD (4 minute video) in about two days, part-time, which came out exactly how I wanted it. Simply plug the camera into your PC, hit a button, and your entire video is put into a timeline view without any hiccups. Then, edit away. Add transitions, still videos, title screens, digital photos, music, slideshows -- the choices are practically endless. Different tracks allow two videos to be shown at once, providing neat picture-in-picture effects, floating text, animations, nifty titles, fades, etc. Integrated DVD burning with the ability to create your own professionally-designed DVD menu screen is also a major plus. Archive and store all of your videos and images in one place, whether they're from your vacation, the kids' activities -- whatever! Premiere makes it simple, and to date, I have not had one crash, hiccup, lost frame, or rendering problem. I have a dedicated hard drive (60 GB) for all of my video/audio work, and I recommend anybody interested in doing these types of processor-intensive tasks do the same. Premiere/Elements is installed right on this drive, so I have plenty of room/memory to keep the thing perfectly oiled and moving.
Adobe makes great products, and the Photoshop Elements/Premiere suite is no exception. Highly recommended.
Customer Review: Elements is Slow and Premiere only works for DV
Summary: 3 Stars
I got this package for my wife, hoping it would be a good, easy-to-use photo and video editor (I use Photoshop CS myself). Unfortunately it's a big disappointment.
First, Photoshop Elements is terribly SLOW, SLOW, SLOW (much worse than the regular Photoshop CS or the previous version of Elements). Using the UI and zooming in and out of pictures is a chore. It feels very bloated.
Second, Adobe Premiere, while ok for basic DV editing, doesn't do the other things it advertises. I tried to import a MPEG2 clip, edit it and then save as Windows Media, but it didn't work (video looked terrible and the sound was missing). It turns out it ONLY works for DV editing - they disabled the ability to edit videos of different sizes, etc.
Also, I wish Premiere supported the new USB 2.0 video transfer capability (called USB Video Class) being implemented by manufacturers so you don't need to buy a separate FireWire card. I'm thinking of getting a JVC GRDZ7U camcorder which has that feature and would love to bring the video directly into Premiere via a high-speed USB 2.0 connection.
I applaud Adobe for bringing out this package for the general consumer - it's long overdue. However, they need to optimize Elements and not cripple Premiere so that it only works on DV.
Frankly, I wish I would have gotten Pinnacle Studio Plus for the video editor and just stuck with Photoshop CS for photo editing.
Customer Review: PREMIERE ELEMENTS -- I've been ** using** it...
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been using Premiere Elements (PE) for several months through several beta releases and have used the final version for a few weeks now. (DISCLAIMER - I am NOT an Adobe employee or shareholder.)
Previously I had bought and used two similar "high end" products and was not very happy with them as a new user and new to digital movie making.
I've found PE for my use to be much easier to use and more suitable than the other companies' products. It never once crashed or locked up my system (WIN XP) as did one of the competitor's products multiple times until I stripped every single program out of my computer, loaded every single update and finally got disgusted.
With Premiere Elements I even used other programs during the process of preparing the movie to be burned and then during actual burning and ended up with an hour of very nice looking video that plays great on both the computer and the DVD player.
I found as I got used to using it that I could produce a usable movie with little effort and as I became more familiar and "explored" other features and option I got to really like the flexibility of processing the sound to remove the noise from my low end Mini DV Camcorder and started to tweak the video in each scene where the shooting conditions weren't optimum.
My personal opinion is that you can't go wrong with PREMIERE ELEMENTS and the package is a great bargain.
I've been a casual user of Photoshop Elements 1.0 then 2.0 and 3.0 with the combined Album is likewise a wonderful program with some nice new features to make it even easier to use for the beginner while providing some more powerful new features.
***I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS PACKAGE !***