Adobe Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements 7

Best Price:
Photography and video are no longer the preserve of the professional but now that anyone can join in, finding ways to manage, modify and share your creations can be a challenge. Adobe’s solution is two linked home applications with professional-strength features. Expectations for these programs will be high because they’re based on software that’s widely used in the industry, but how easily can the average user get to grips with such sophisticated tools?

Features:
Neither program is short on features. Photoshop Elements provides full photo-editing and organising capabilities, and lets you make collages, slideshows and greetings cards from your snaps. Red eye-removal is simple and colour-adjustment is a one-click solution.

Premiere Elements includes everything you’d expect from a video-editing program, with a range of effects and transitions, templates for DVD menus and support for high-definition video. One such effect is chroma key, the technique of replacing a plain background or area with another piece of video. It’s the effect used in films to make a man lying in front of a green screen look like they’re flying through the air.

Performance:
As you’d expect from Adobe, the software is fast and functional. Even in Premiere Elements, where you might expect some lag in previewing effects, the program performs well. There’s no annoying wait for the software to catch up.

Ease of use:
Premiere Elements provides an Instant Movie feature, which lets you select a few video clips and then choose an overall look and feel for the movie using a wizard. You don’t have to get into the details of editing with this, but you lose some control over the material and end up with what’s essentially a moving picture slideshow. Full editing is via drag-and-drop using the sceneline to order shots and the timeline to make finer adjustments.

Photoshop Elements includes a very handy quick-selection tool that makes isolating items in a photo pretty easy, but both applications lack an intuitive design and require some learning.

Value for money:
Getting a decent photo editor and video application together for under £100 is pretty good value but there are much cheaper alternatives, such as Windows Movie Maker and the free, full-featured Paint.NET (www.getpaint.net). You can’t use chroma key in Movie Maker, but you can put together a decent little movie to upload on YouTube so bear in mind, when you’re considering paying for the Adobe, that it’s only the advanced features that make it worth the purchase.