Log in

View Full Version : Adobe Releases Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7


Jason Dunn
08-28-2008, 09:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/consumer/' target='_blank'>http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/consumer/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"New Adobe&reg; Photoshop&reg; Elements 7 &amp; Adobe Premiere&reg; Elements 7 software with Photoshop.com Plus** membership combines two powerful yet easy-to-use products, so you can do so much more with your photos and videos. Easily create extraordinary photos and incredible movies, use them together in cinematic slide shows and other creations, and stay connected with your favorite people and memories."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1219881851.usr1.jpg" border="0" /></p><p>Photoshop Elements is a superb program, and provides most of the photo editing needs for beginner to enthusiast users - a good number of people that dish out the megabucks for Photoshop CS3 would be well served by Photoshop Elements. It's a bit hard to decode exactly what's new, but <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/psprelements/features/" target="_blank">looking at this page</a>, I'd say they've added the ability to combine a mask with a paint effect - they're calling it Adobe Smart Brush. Might be dodging and burning on steroids? The description is pretty vague. They have Adobe Photomerge as well, which allows you to combine several near-identical photos to get the best parts of each one. It's listed as "new" but this feature is in Photoshop Elements 6, so Adobe calling it new is confusing. Adobe really needs to come up with a better list of what's new and what's not - they can look to Ulead for <a href="http://www.ulead.com/pi/new.htm" target="_blank">how it should be done</a>.</p><p>One of the new features of this software, and seemingly what they put most of their efforts into, is actually a software service: Photoshop.com Plus. If you sign up for the yearly service, you get template updates, 20 GB of online storage for your photos and videos, online album sharing, and the rather-vague-sounding "access your photos and videos from anywhere". <MORE /></p><p>I have a sort of love/hate with Premiere Elements - I keep buying every new version, hoping against hope that it will be <a href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/32205/adobe-premiere-elements-4-crash-crash-crash.html" target="_blank">more stable and crash less often</a>. Oh, and be faster too - it's such a sluggish program. Side rant: it drives me absolutely nuts that Adobe never releases software updates for their Elements products - no software is perfect, but Adobe doesn't seem to put any effort towards solving problems that current users have with their software in the form of software updates. I literally can't think of any other software company on the planet that does this - even the mighty Microsoft releases software updates for Word and Excel to fix bugs. Why does Adobe think they're above serving their users in this way? I'm hoping that by skipping three versions ahead (the version prior to 7 was 4) this is Adobe's way of saying "We've improved the product so much, it's 7th generation software!".</p><p>At any rate, despite my complaints, I'm looking forward to check out the latest duo of this software - and just in time too, I was ready to ditch Premiere Elements and switch to Sony Vegas. We'll see how the new software is...</p>

marlof
08-28-2008, 09:18 AM
I hardly ever do video editing, but for the times I need to do it, I use Premiere Elements 3 (yes, I know, I'm an upgrade or two behind). I also have Premiere Pro (1 or 2, I don't know), but Elements does everything I need, and at one time I didn't want to pay for the Pro upgrade when Elements full price was cheaper. I think version 3 is the only one of which Adobe brought out an update: 3.0.2, for Vista support and bug fixes. It took me while to figure out why my version 3 didn't work with my new HP Slimline running Vista Premium, since like you I didn't count on an upgrade. After running the update, it completely worked. Even my old Canon MV20i (for which XP SP1 killed the support) can be controlled from within Premiere Elements now. So I'm happy. Whenever I'll upgrade to a HD video camera, I'll think about upgrading.

jaxim
08-28-2008, 02:09 PM
I used to use Photoshop Elements to organize my photos, but when Vista came out, I started using Photo Gallery and then Windows Live Photo Gallery. After a over a year of using Photo Gallery, I really miss some of the features that were in the Organizer of Photoshop Elements. The only reason I don't go back is the reason I made the switch. I don't like that Photoshop Elements places all of their mete tag data into a separate database file. If you make a backup of your photos without this database file, all of your tags would be lost if you had to recover from a hard drive failure. I much prefer Microsoft's method of placing the tags inside the photo file's meta data. However, I still long for much of the robustness of Elements.

John Lane
08-28-2008, 04:40 PM
Same here. I don't seen any real updates in Elements 7. It seems like a giant push to sell their website.