By Dale Farris, Reviews Coordinator
Golden Triangle PC Club
August 2007

Overview

In this exciting combined package, Adobe joins 2 of the more significant image editing programs now on the market for those new to these types of programs. For many years, Adobe's Photoshop program has rightly claimed superiority status as the lead image editing program, and the Adobe Premier program has quickly established its solid reputation as the video image editing program of choice. Both these high-end, powerful programs are the mainstays of professionals in these fields, and over the past few years, Adobe has wisely created less complicated versions of both programs aimed at novices, or those new to using Photoshop or Premier.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 is the latest, newest version of the Photoshop program that is less expensive and less complex than its big brother, and Premier Elements 3 is the latest, newest version of Premier that is also less expensive and less complex than its own big brother. Now, Adobe goes even further and packages these 2 Elements program together in one application, which is a sound strategy. While the large professional market continues to work with the feature-rich, more expensive of Photoshop and Premier, there has also developed an equally solid market of customers who are interested in the more common, less intricate features in the Elements variations of Photoshop and Premier. Now, these customers can obtain both these Elements versions of Photoshop and Premier in this one combined package.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 software combines power and simplicity to help you do it all: Edit and enhance your photos, keep them at your fingertips, and show off your creativity in new, entertaining ways. Photoshop Elements 5 provides at a very reasonable price the most common, user-friendly features from Adobe's powerhouse program, Adobe Photoshop CS3. In Elements 5, Adobe has packaged the essentials tools for anyone interested in manipulating digital media, and Elements 5 is geared to the entry-level photo-editing market of customers who may be just beginning to use a digital camera.

Adobe Premier Elements 3 makes creating and sharing impressive home videos a snap. Burn your footage to DVD in two simple steps, complete with a DVD menu and scene index, or easily assemble your movie by rearranging clips with drag-and-drop simplicity. And share your movies on DVD, the web, mobile phones, and virtually anywhere else.

This major new package combines two powerful yet easy-to-use products to deliver the most complete photo and video editing solution. Entertain friends with unique cinematic slide shows and dramatic freeze-frame effects, create personalized DVDs, and easily share on the web.

Reasons To Upgrade

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 plus Adobe Premiere Elements 3 software combines two powerful yet easy-to-use products to deliver the most complete photo and video editing solution. Jazz up photo slide shows with cinematic effects and transitions; use freeze frames to add a dramatic pause to your video or to make professional-looking DVD covers and labels; create personalized DVDs; and easily share on the web. Now telling your stories with photos and videos is easier than ever.

Top Features of the Combined Products

Put photo slide shows in motion
Create a traditional photo slide show, and then add video-style effects and transitions and add motion to your text. Preview the slide show in full screen and then burn it to DVD to share with family and friends.

Do more with individual video frames
Capture a single video frame, add text, graphics, and other enhancements, and then put the frame back in your movie for a fun or dramatic freeze-frame effect. Or grab a video frame and create a personalized DVD cover for your movie.

Include treasured memories in your videos
Add visual depth and variety to your videos by including scanned old photographs and digital still photos.

Instantly fix common flaws or perform advanced editing
Fix common flaws with a click and edit with less fuss; perfect your photos with advanced options; and have fun with artistic compositing and special effects.

Show photos in creative, entertaining ways
Make customized photo creations using themed layouts for everything from albums to postcards, scrapbook pages to DVD covers, and use Flash technology to animate your photos and create interactive web galleries. Take advantage of Intel Viiv technology to show photos and slide shows on your TV (requires a Media Center PC), edit photos from your mobile phone, and take photos with you on handheld devices.

Easily find and view your photos and video clips
Keep your photos and video clips at your fingertips with faster, easier downloading, custom tagging, powerful search options, and viewing choices that let you sort and find your photos the way that works best for you. Take advantage of built-in photo services that let you upload photos and photo creations to the web, order prints, and more from within Photoshop Elements.

Get started quickly creating home videos and DVDs
Get started quickly with helpful moviemaking options: Move footage from your camera to DVD in two simple steps, or drop it into the new Sceneline to rearrange clips and add transitions with drag-and-drop ease.

Wow your audience with amazing effects
Dazzle your audience with effects, transitions, and animations that are professional quality yet easy to apply, so you can develop your signature style and never run out of options.

Share your videos virtually anywhere
Show your video to any audience, on the web, mobile phones, handheld devices, or VHS. Even share personalized DVDs with menus that come alive with your photos, video clips, and music.

Top Features of Adobe Photoshop Elements 5

Get started quickly with flexible layout options
Use flexible layout options as a starting point for your creations: Choose a blank slate, basic frameworks, or professionally designed themes—it’s your choice!

Animate your photos
Go beyond traditional slide shows by sharing photos in your choice of animated galleries created using Flash technology, including a spinning carousel and a book with pages that turn.

Share your animated photo creations on the web
Easily upload your creations and Flash based photo galleries to the web from directly within Photoshop Elements.

Experience superior editing
Make good photos great with superior editing tools. Fine-tune color, brightness, and exposure using new color curves adjustments; create rich black-and-white conversions; easily correct camera lens distortions; and sharpen blurred edges.

Share with family and friends using built-in photo services
Take advantage of built-in photo services that let you upload photos and photo creations to the web, order Kodak prints, and more from within Photoshop Elements.

Get started quickly with flexible layout options Use flexible layout options as a starting point for your creations: Choose a blank slate, basic frameworks, or professionally designed themes — it's your choice!

Map your memories
Relive memories by viewing and sharing your photos displayed on an interactive map in the exact locations where they were taken (works with United States addresses only). Even upload your map to the web for easy sharing.

Enjoy enhanced support for working with raw files Get the highest quality results by editing the raw image files from your digital camera. Photoshop Elements now supports an even greater selection of digital camera models.

Create fun Flipbooks
Easily turn a series of still photos into an eye-catching Flipbook. For example, take a sequence of action shots using the burst mode on your digital camera, and then let Photoshop Elements string them together to create a sense of motion.

Back up photos online
Back up your photo collection online, on CD, or both with the integrated online backup service provided by one of the nation's leading document security specialists.

View photos on your TV
Take advantage of compatibility with Intel Viiv technology to show photos and slide shows on your TV (requires a Media Center PC).

Share photos on mobile phones and handheld devices
Easily download and edit photos from your mobile phone, and then send them to friends.

Top Features of Adobe Premiere Elements 3

Easily assemble your video clips in the Sceneline
Assemble your video faster in the Sceneline, a new alternative to the Timeline that lets you quickly drag and drop to rearrange thumbnails of your clips or add transitions and effects. It’s as easy as making a photo slide show.

Edit and preview in one convenient place — the Monitor window
Edit and view your movie in one convenient place, the Monitor window, where you can easily trim and split clips, drop filters and effects on a frame, create fun picture-in-picture effects, type text right on the screen, and preview in full screen.

Count on support for the latest video devices
Import video from virtually any device, including HDV and DVD camcorders, web cameras (WDM analog), MPEG-4 video recorders, and mobile phones. Get sharp, beautiful results by capturing and editing native HDV footage.

Share on mobile phones and handheld devices
Show your finished movies on virtually any handheld device, including mobile phones, Apple iPods, and PSP (PlayStation Portable) systems.

Have fun with stop-motion animation
Try your hand at animation! Use Stop Motion Capture to create your own time-lapse movies, claymations, and other animations.

Narrate your stories
Tell the story in your own voice by adding narration to your video.

What's New in Photoshop Elements 5?

The program's Organizer component has always allowed you to create virtual "stacks" of similar photos so they don't take up unnecessary space in the browser window. Version 5 further refines this handy feature. Now the Organizer can analyze the time stamp and visual content of your photos to suggest image stacks automatically. You can also expand stacks to view their full contents right in the main browser, rather than in a discrete window.

Adobe has completely overhauled Organizer's sharing tools, and the company made good use of its recent Macromedia acquisition by enabling you to create attractive and customizable Flash Web photo galleries with Elements 5. Organizer's ability to plot photos on a calendar by when they were taken is nothing new or unique. One of the new version's standout new features extends this logic to show you where you took your photos by plotting them on a Yahoo! map. In the likely event your images don't already include GPS metadata, you can either place photos directly into the map window using drag-and-drop, or right-click images to enter location information (down to street address). Your photos show up as red pushpins on the zoomable map; click a pin to see the associated photos for that location.

The Editor component also shows a host of strong improvements. The new Adjust Color Curves command narrows the gap between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements a little. Elements offers a simplified version of the Curves command (a tool for adjusting contrast and color), sacrificing a little control for a much friendlier interface. Similarly, Editor's effective new Adjust Sharpness and Correct Camera Distortion commands both scale down their Photoshop analogs. Another new feature gives you excellent tonal control for converting a color image to black and white.

Editor's new Artwork and Effects palette packs good news for scrapbookers, with attractive and customizable Themes designed to frame and present your photos specifically for album pages, greeting cards, and the like. And yet another groundbreaking feature lets you save multipage image files in Elements' proprietary new PSE file format.

You'll find many other exciting new features in this great upgrade. For those who want a well-integrated package that handles photo organizing, editing, and sharing, Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 is the way to go.

What's New in Premier Elements 3?

People upload more than 65,000 videos to the YouTube video-sharing site every day. With the release of Adobe's new Premiere Elements 3, YouTube might want to brace itself for an even bigger onslaught of uploads. This video editing application is so good and so easy to use, it may encourage even more people to share their videos.

Building With Storyboards
The most obvious update to the application is the addition of a storyboard feature (Adobe calls it a "Sceneline") to supplement the application's standard timeline. Both can serve as the application's main working platform for arranging video and audio clips and transitions, applying effects, adjusting sound levels, and implementing other features, but storyboards are more common in video editing applications aimed at novices.

Storyboards are easier to work with because they use fixed time slots--you drag your clips to boxes in the storyboard, and then drag transitions into boxes in between the clips (or, unique to Elements 3, you can right-click on the boxes and choose transitions from a list). Adobe's Sceneline even labels clip boxes with 'Drag a clip here to add to movie.' The Sceneline isn't much different than, say, Pinnacle Studio's storyboard (except that the boxes are bigger), but it's still a nice addition to the application; as with Pinnacle Studio, even experienced users may find it handy to use a storyboard to quickly assemble a rough layout, and then switch over to the timeline for finer control.

Most of the other improvements are relatively minor, but still welcome. You can now import and edit high-definition video (HD camcorders are still expensive and rare, but I appreciate the future-proofing). A new stop-motion capture mode lets you capture still images from your camcorder at regular, adjustable intervals (think Claymation). Just plug in your camcorder and set two parameters, and the application will automatically insert the still images into the Sceneline or timeline.

Telling Your Story
Clicking a new button near the top of the Premiere Elements screen lets you record voice narration if you have a microphone attached to your computer. When you're done recording, the application automatically inserts your recording into a new "narration" track in the Sceneline or timeline. This feature is easy to use, and just the presence of the button encouraged me to add narrations.

Want to add a title screen to your composition? With previous versions, you had to drag the title into the timeline. Elements 3 lets you click a button and then begin typing; all the usual font styles and character controls are easily accessible in a nearby window.

If you use Premiere Elements 2 and you're comfortable with its timeline, you may not consider Elements 3 a significant upgrade. Except for the Sceneline, the new version is mostly a collection of small enhancements. After all, the predecessor was excellent to begin with. But Elements 3 is just that much better.

Bottom Line Recommendation

This super new combination of Photoshop Elements 5 with Premier Elements 3 now means customers can easily afford to acquire both these essential Elements programs and enjoy the powerful features that have made these programs so popular with the market. Anyone who owns a previous versions of either of these 2 Elements programs will want to give serious consideration to upgrading to this new combined package. While you can still singularly purchase one or the other of these Elements programs, the pricing for this combined package does present a savings to you if you were interested in both programs. In addition, purchasing this combined package means you will have only one install routine to complete.

Price

$149.99 retail price for the 2-program package

$99.99 retail price for single license of Photoshop Elements 5
$99.99 retail price for single license of Premier Elements 3

System Configuration Requirements

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5

P-4 or Celeron (or compatible) 1.3GHz processor
(dual-core processors and those with Hyper-Threading Technology supported)
Windows XP Pro, Home, or Media Center Edition (SP2)
1.5GB free hard disk space
256MB RAM (512MB recommended)
Color monitor with 16-bit color video card
1,024 x 768 monitor resolution at 96dpi or less
DirectX 9 compatible display driver
CD-ROM drive

Adobe Premiere Elements 3

P-4 or Celeron 1.3GHz processor
(or compatible processor with SSE2 support)
dual-core processors and those with Hyper-Threading Technology supported
P-4 3GHz processor required for HDV
Windows XP Pro, Home, or Media Center Edition (SP2)
4GB free hard disk space
1GB required for HDV
512MB RAM
1GB RAM required for HDV
Color monitor with 16-bit color video card
1,024 x 768 monitor resolution
DirectX 9 compatible sound and display driver
DVD-ROM drive (compatible DVD burner required to burn DVDs)
DV/i.LINK/FireWire/IEEE 1394 interface to connect a Digital 8 or DV camcorder, or a USB2 interface to connect a DV-via-USB-compatible DV camcorder (other video devices supported via the Media Downloader)

Adobe Premiere Elements import/export formats supported

MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DV, AVI, Windows Media, QuickTime, JVC Everio MOD (import only), 3GP, ASF (import only), WAV, WMA (import only), Dolby Digital stereo, PSD (import only), JPEG, PNG (import only), DVD

Language Versions

Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Spanish
Swedish

Contact

Adobe Systems, Incorporated
Corporate Headquarters
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, California 95110-2704
408-536-6000
800-833-6687
FAX 408-537-6000

Order Online at Adobe Corporation
http://www.adobe.com/store/main.jhtml

You can also order from other retailers or online vendors.