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Adobe Elements 14 freatures a Video Editor, Media organizer, and photo editor

Adobe has unveiled the 14th version of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Nosotros spent some time with advance copies of both, and here'south what we learned: For those looking for a powerful, but withal easy-to-utilize, set of photo and video editing tools, Adobe's new Elements 14 is difficult to beat. Meanwhile, anyone planning on working with 4K videos should take a look at Premiere Elements xiv.

Photoshop Elements adds shake reduction and haze removal tools

With that summary out of the way, allow's dive in. Two of the more heady new features in Photoshop Elements 14 are borrowed from Adobe'southward ain Photoshop CC: filters to remove photographic camera shake and atmospheric haze. Before anyone gets also excited, this doesn't mean you lot don't need to hold your photographic camera every bit still as possible, or can shoot in heavy fog and expect the software to brand it look like a sunny day. The shake reduction filter can aid save an image and make it at to the lowest degree usable, but won't make it slap-up.

Similarly, Haze Removal (available in Expert fashion, and very similar to the Dehaze tool establish in the Photographic camera Raw module of Photoshop CC) tin't work miracles. You can see from this prototype of the Plain of Temples in Bagan, Myanmar that the filter works wonders for the foreground of the image, but can only remove some of the haze roofing the mountain range across the river in the background:

Photoshop Elements 14 now includes a haze removal tool like its big brother Photoshop CC

Photoshop Elements fourteen now includes a brume removal tool like its big blood brother Photoshop CC

Tricky selections and facial recogintion are now a lot easier

Photoshop Elements 14 also adds a guided edit that allows you lot to add motion mistiness to images, and an enhanced Refine Edge command in Expert mode that intelligently aids the selection of finely-detailed areas like hair and fur. I used it on this very hard image of a male panthera leo framed against an earth tone background. I started with a very simple pick and and so "painted" around the border with the Refine Edge tool. While non perfect, the consequence took me just a minute or two, while doing by hand could hands have consumed 20 or thirty minutes.

African lion framed by a very-similarly-colored background

Photoshop Elements 14 features a very powerful version of Refine Edge that allows you to fairly quickly do a reasonable job of isolating detailed subjects

Photoshop Elements has had facial recognition to assistance in organizing images past person for a while. But version xiv has improved the interface, and the underlying algorithms seem to be more powerful and more accurate — much like the ones introduced in Lightroom CC 2022 (aka Lightroom half-dozen). The process of tagging and naming people is now quite straightforward and relatively painless.

Overall Photoshop Elements maintains its splendid interface

I'm a big fan of the three modes of the Elements editor — Quick, Guided, and Proficient. Information technology is crawly to be able to move back and forth between them during an editing session, depending on the chore at mitt. For fast work, the Auto tools in the Quick mode get better with every release. Oftentimes they are all an image needs for quick posting to the spider web or a social media site.

For a deeper dive, perhaps into types of corrections with which you are unfamiliar, the enhanced Guided fashion helps you find your mode through a series of steps that might otherwise require watching a tutorial video and trying to take notes and repeat the steps on your own. There are more Guided edits than ever — helpfully separated into Basic, Color, Black & White, Fun Edits, Special Effects, and Photomerge. Finally, there is the Adept style, for when you lot know what you want. It is nearly as powerful as the photo-specific tools in Photoshop.

The Photoshop Elements 14 Editor is designed to scale its UI elements automatically on high-DPI Windows machines. But some, like the Surface Pro iii, don't have quite plenty resolution to button the UI over to 200% zoom. Yous can strength that manually past going to Preferences -> Displays & Cursors -> Loftier Density Displays, and selecting it yourself. Information technology will cut off a bit of the lesser of some screens, merely it nevertheless works okay.The Elements Organizer application and the Premiere Elements Editor automatically zoomed on my test Surface Pro 3.

You may need to manually zoom your Photoshop Elements 14 interface, if you don't want it to look tiny like on this screenshot from a Surface Pro 3.

You may demand to manually zoom your Photoshop Elements 14 interface, if you don't want it to look tiny like on this screenshot from a Surface Pro 3.

Premiere Elements gets 4K back up, ameliorate audio tools, and motion titles

Premiere Elements 14 has added support for motion titles in videosThe headline feature in the new version of Premiere Elements is support for 4K video. Now that many cameras, including many action cameras and drones, can capture 4K video, information technology was a no-brainer for Adobe to add together support for it to Elements. Extensive support for movement titles has also been added. It is also now possible to create black-and-white versions of your video while colorizing specific subjects. As well calculation those new features, Adobe has also beefed upwards the sound editor and many of the guided edit tools in the product.

Calculation move titles is really easy, since Adobe has provided a set of templates that y'all can beginning with. From there, you can brand your text await how yous want, change the layout of the titles, or their background. The resulting videos expect quite professional:

Like Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements has a three-way interface — Quick, Guided, and Practiced — but the modes are structured a piffling differently. The Quick mode features wizards for creating an edited video on your ain or using a template, and for learning video editing. The Guided style presents common tasks in more than or less the aforementioned club you lot might perform them in an editing session — starting with adding your media and trimming clips, and finishing up with adding various special effects, titles, and narrations.

Elements is all the same the get-to production for those who don't desire a subscription

Now that Adobe has officially cutting the price of its Photography Cloud subscription to $10/month for Photoshop, Lightroom, and its mobile apps, the economical advantage of spending $100 on each new version of Photoshop Elements isn't all that compelling unless y'all but upgrade every few years. A better reason to choose Elements over Photoshop is that information technology is much more intuitive and easy to use than either Lightroom or Photoshop CC.

For photographers who don't want to be beholden to Adobe in the form of an annual subscription, Photoshop Elements fourteen is as well a great alternative. For videographers, the economical case is more compelling, since Premiere Pro is only bachelor with the more expensive cloud subscriptions ($50/month and up) or equally a single application subscription ($20/month).

With Elements 14, Adobe has once again raised the bar for consumer-focused photograph and video editing applications. Roughly speaking, they contain nigh the same functionality that their large-brother applications, Photoshop and Premiere Pro, featured only a few years agone. For photographers, if you can alive without some of the esoteric features of Photoshop and Lightroom CC like mobile sync and content-aware, then you can save some money by getting the less-expensive and easier-to-use Photoshop Elements for $100 or less. Similarly, if y'all aren't a professional video editor, the $100 Premiere Elements is likely to be a ameliorate option than Premiere Pro. You can get a packet of both Elements applications (which each include the Media Organizer application) for $150.

[Image credit: Cardinal Photo]