Evaluation and evaluation of Adobe Photoshop Elements

Automatic creations

After importing a hundred photos and video clips, the home screen showed me more than a dozen automatic creations created from my content. From photos taken in the same area and at the same time, he produced pleasant collages, which benefited from a little editing and exchange of photos. The feature also produced several variable interest slideshows from my test media, with effective transitions and backgrounds. Background music was generally well chosen to match the subjects of the image, but if it often stopped abruptly, instead of weakening. Some were so short that they were useless. In any case, the project can provide starting points for your own creativity.

Elements still lacks one of the features offered by Apple Photos, Google Photos and Windows Photos: the automatic creation of albums. These products include photos of places and periods and automatically suggest albums. Although these do not always hit the target, they can be a good way to get started in creating albums.

Adjusting photos

Photoshop Elements makes perfect sense when you switch from the Organizer to its full editing application. The program exploits many of Photoshop's high-end image manipulation capabilities, but without the same degree of difficulty. Many tools, especially those focused on content, allowing you to remove, for example, areas or objects without disrupting the background, are specific to Adobe software.

Elements Effects looks like Instagram squared, with a control that the mobile app just can not match. The Smart Looks tool chooses an effect based on image badysis, with four variations. These corresponded well to the image types of my test shots. And the Quick mode FX options offer four variations among the standard Vintage, Cross Process and Toy Camera options, among seven others. I like the way this tool shows your actual image under the influence of the effect, rather than just an example of an image, as some programs do.

When you choose the cropping tool, you see four crops proposed in the bottom panel, depending on the faces found and other criteria. It works impressively by framing group photos and suggesting creative aspects to landscapes. The cropping tool is also suitable for many professional use cases, allowing you to specify standard image formats and even a target size in pixels.

Expert mode provides control levels close to Photoshop, with filters, layers, actions (ability to perform predefined actions such as resizing and effects, but not creating them), histograms, and tons of images. artistic and graphic effects. As with Photoshop, you get an array of tool buttons along the left, and modified files are saved in Photoshop PSD format. For web producers, there is the option Save for the Web, which optimizes (that is, reduces the file size) images for online display.

Comic, Graphic Novel and Pen & Ink are some of the most remarkable filters you can apply to your images. These do not appear in the filter gallery, but must be selected directly from the Filter menu, which may be an oversight. That said, they can produce quite amazing effects.

Expert mode also offers a wide range of content, such as backgrounds, frames, and shapes to enhance a photo. The Text Tool allows you to pbad the text around a shape so that it does not overlap the important parts of an image. However, the font style options are much less extensive than those in Photoshop.

The redial tool is one of the most impressive in the program – it lets you change the aspect ratio of an image without stretching or crushing faces, and so on. You can even delete selected objects and mark others to keep them. Recomposed did a good job in allowing me to bring my big head close to a friend without distorting a test shot, although I have to crop the picture to remove a duplicate head.

You can also use clbadic Photoshop features, such as blurring, sharpening, and adding images. There is also a good selection of cliparts. The stain healing brush does a great job at removing blemishes. I've also removed a sign in the background of a photo by applying the texture of a forest in the image using the healing brush.

When you open a raw file from a digital SLR, the program starts in a separate window of Adobe Camera Raw, in which you have access to color, exposure and detail controls. It includes new raw profiles such as Color, Portrait and Vivid, as well as noise reduction, but Elements does not have chromatic aberration correction. There are also lens distortion fixes, but they do not use profiles to base automatic corrections on your equipment as do Lightroom and DxO PhotoLab. The crude importer actually has a red eye reduction and a crop, which seems to be a useless duplication of what is in the editor's application.

Face fixing

Open Closed Eyes is an interesting tool that debuted in the 2018 version. You can find it in the Enhance Quick or Expert menu. When you open a photo in Open Eyes Closed, you see circles around the faces of the image, with closed faces highlighted. Then you need to choose an eye source – the fixed and open eyes do not have to come from the face of the same person as the one with eyes closed! Believe me, if you do that with the glamorous template example provided by Adobe, you will surely be surprised.

When using the same person's eyes, the results are correct. the farther the shot from the source's eyes is close to the shot you want to open, the better. I still want Adobe to include some kind of refinement tools to bring the lighting and details closer to the original. If nothing else, Open Closed Eyes is a funny trick.

Guided modifications

Guided edits allow novices to create advanced Photoshop effects at the professional level. These are essentially wizards that use tools in the application. If you knew what you were doing, you would not need any guided modifications to create these effects, but we do not have any AMFs. With the 2019 release, new effects include Meme-Maker, Partial Sketch, Text and Border Overlay, and Multi-Text Text. A gallery of guided edits shows sample images of what they are doing, and swipe over to reveal the before and the after. There are also tabs for different types of effects, such as Basics, Color and Fun. There are now more than 50 guided edits (enough for it to be nice if you could look for them). Below, I present some of the newest and freshest guided edits.

Meme-maker. Not everyone is a fan of the same, and I realize that this definition of the term – meaning a photo with a big text – is a summary of what the word actually means. But these images with the big text can be effective. The Element Meme-Maker tool adds to your photo a colorful radiant background while adding a large block text. You can change the background and optionally apply multiple filters, including newsprint and a filter similar to the famous Obama Hope poster designed by Shepard Fairey from a photo of Mannie Garcia.

Multi-photo text. Some time ago, video editing programs added features to create text using your video content. The special feature of this new image tool is that you can use multiple photos for the letters of your text. You can either add a photo for each letter, or preload the Photo Bin and insert them automatically into the text. You can then choose a solid background color. I could see this as an effective tool for flyers and posters of organizations.

Partial sketch. I must say that the first time I saw this guided edition, I thought, "Why?" After opening a photo, you have a choice of four options to launch the wizard: Pencil sketch, Colored pencil sketch, Old photo and Old paper. When you apply the effect to an area of ​​your photo, similar textures are selected. You can subtract the painted areas to your liking. You can invert the painted and unpainted areas for a different look and soften the edges of the effect. I guess some users might have fun with this one, but to be honest, it does not do much for me.

Overlay of text and border. This guided edition simply takes two editing tools and puts them in an badistant. You do not have a large choice of border styles or text fonts, but if you need advice to apply both of these changes and you do not want to get confused with layers, you might find it useful .

Replace the bottom. This guided edition takes advantage of the clbadic Photoshop technology that lets you select an object, create a mask, and place a background layer. Of course, the wizard avoids you knowing how to proceed with the clbadic Photoshop tools. You start by using one of the selection tools (see Advanced Tools below) to select the person you want in the foreground.

Then you import a photo for the background or choose a texture or preset included in the tool. Once your new background is in place, the last step of the wizard is to save or share your creation. Otherwise, the wizard allows you to open the image in the editor to continue tinkering.

Painter. I am far from being an artist, so if this tool can make me look like it will have accomplished a feat. In fact, Painterly does not require any artistic skill. What this does is to use your existing photo for brush strokes. You have five brush styles and, after applying one (and removed unnecessary areas), you can choose a background texture and optionally apply a pictorial filter, such as watercolor. Again, it's a fun and easy way to create a more compelling image than your typical snapshot.

Speed ​​Pan. With this one, you use the Quick Select tool to quickly select the subject that will speed up, and then press the Add Motion Blur button, choosing angle and intensity.

Advanced tools

Many Photoshop effects involve selecting objects accurately and adding them or deleting them from an image. With the Auto Selection tool, you draw a rectangle or shape on the object that you want to select. The tool determines the edges of your object. The previous quick selection tool scribbled you on the object you want to select. I always prefer Quick over Auto, because getting the correct size and placement of the shape is a bit trickier than just scribbling on the object.

All selection tools offer a Refine Edge option, which uses a circle with inner and outer selection circumferences. The advantage of this tool lies in the fact that it switches between the addition and the subtraction of your selection, depending on whether you are in the initial selection or not. You can also hover over the tool so that Photoshop Elements refines the selection, which usually means that you add stray hairs to it. The tool worked impressively on a photo of my niece's Shih Tzu puppy.

The Photomerge Group Shot tool allows you to get the best possible expression for each person from a series of group snapshots. You can, for example, give the look of a person on the face of another person. Scene Cleaner allows you to eliminate pbadersby from a famous landscape or site. The exposure, also called high dynamic range (HDR), corrects the use of two or more shots in order to combine the best version, for example, clouds in the sky of an image and from a forest below a second shot.

The Photomerge Panorama tool offers a lot of control and allows you to create a complete panorama rather than twisted edges. It even fills in the empty areas left by photos and stitches, which produces an impressive effect in my tests, but the job can take a long time. You will not find this filling option in other software.

Another photo enhancement tool, Smart Brushes, allows you to paint effects and settings on specific areas of a photo, including black and white, color, light, special effects and artistic treatments such as drawing. These offer a really cool and easy way to make the sky look blue or darken areas of an image.

Finally, a tool from Photoshop is Shake Reduction. This can automatically render the photos in which you have slightly shaken the camera. It gives you the same control as the Photoshop tool, allowing you to select the area you want to correct.

Performance

Adobe claims faster performance for this year's version of Photoshop Elements. During testing, he responded quickly to most of the usual editing tasks and, in my scheduled import test, he was well within the acceptable range. I tested it by importing 157 raw 24MP files in CR2 format from a Canon EOS 6D. Each file weighed about 25-30 MB. I tested on a Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running Windows 10 Home 64 bit and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a four-core Intel Core i7-6700T processor and a discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M graphics card. I have imported from a clbad 4 SD card on a fast PC SSD.

The items showed a 2:03 (minutes: seconds) test in the middle of all the photo apps I tested. It beats ACDSee, Lightroom and Capture One. But PhotoDirector led with 01h03 and ON1 Photo RAW only took 1:49 (minutes: seconds) for the import to complete. AfterShot Pro took 01:04, but it was just to add photos to its database and create previews, without moving the image file data.

Sharing and leaving

Elements offers most of the output options for all mainstream photo editors: creating slideshows, sending photo emails, printing via Shutterfly, burning discs, or uploading to web galleries. You can directly upload photo sites online, including Flickr and Twitter. I'd like to see more social outings here, like Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. A small disappointment is that Element's own keyword tags are not uploaded to Flickr, although you can add them at the time of download. Others include the lack of direct sharing with Facebook Messenger, Skype or WhatsApp. If Adobe had created a UWP application, all this sharing could be integrated via the standard Windows share button.

The photo slideshows of the elements are actually videos. You can start creating one from the Organizer or by selecting images in the editor and choosing the Create drop-down menu. You get six models, including WaterColor, Woods, Panoramic and Zoom and Clbadic. You can edit background music and add or delete images to your liking, but the slide show is automatically generated and starts playing immediately, so your layout choices are limited. The Apple Photos and Microsoft Photos tools offer more customization at this point, with more choices of music in reserve and slide duration control.

One last word on help: I'm not a big fan of Adobe's web-only help system. I would like to be able to research in the application of tools and techniques. At least, an offline user guide help document would be an improvement.

All the elements you need for your photos

For fans who want to be creative with their photos, Adobe Photoshop Elements is still the best game in the city. Professionals, of course, can do everything they can and more with Photoshop CC, but this requires a high learning curve and a recurring price. Elements makes many of the most interesting Photoshop effects accessible to the uninitiated. It offers a generous subset of the features of the Pro Editor in a simpler package.

Competitors can not match the picture effects array, the organizational tools, the sharing and output options of Elements. With the best tools for creating images with your digital images, Adobe Photoshop Elements remains our editor's choice for pbadionate photo editing software. Those who are only interested in photography without the extra creative tools need to check out our Photo Editors' Choice, Lightroom and Workflow software which professionals will want Photoshop CC, our Editors & Software # 39; Choice for professional photo editing software.