Adobe Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7

I am new to Adobe Photoshop. I travel alot and take lots of pictures. I wanted to have a program that I could be creative with my photos. I am starting from scratch so It is a slow process. You definitely have to be computer literate, which I am. I do like it and think I will enjoy working with it.

I have never attempted to make a movie and put it on a dvd before. It is awesome. I can jazz up home videos and share it with the faimly. I am able to use most of the photoshop for enhancing my paintings that I scan in. There are still many features I have, yet to figure out.

Adobe Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 offers two great products for the user who does not require the full fledged version of either program. If you're not a video editor or professional photographer, this package will suit you perfectly. The upload to Youtube feature on Premiere Elements 7 is particularly useful for the casual videographer. The video editing options are more robust than you might find on iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, and the program also allows you to design DVD titles etc. to add some nice touches to your movies. I found that uploading from my Canon HD camcorder was a bit cumbersome at first; having never done it before, it took a few attempts before the audio/visual was uploaded to the computer in sync. This may have been due to multi-tasking while uploading the video; it is recommended your computer to only upload the video (no surfing the 'net or listening to tunes while doing it!), since it is pretty processor intensive. Once I figured out the correct HD/file settings and left my computer alone, however, the captured video was easy to work with and looked exceptional. The YouTube file uploaded looked spectacular as well, even compressed; much better (and easier) than shrinking the file size by yourself.

Photoshop Elements has some nice organization features to keep your albums in order, as well as the cadre of editing tools one would expect if they've previously used a Photoshop product. There is a bit of a learning curve if one has never used Photoshop, however the included tutorials are simple enough that even a novice can make crops, edits and cuts with relative ease after an hour or two. One irritating thing is that, upon installing the program, Photoshop Elements insists on importing all your photos into the program by default. This can be turned off, but I think this should be asked during installation if you wish the program to do so. This is annoying for me since I sell a lot of stuff on eBay and don't want to keep my pictures of old stuff cataloged. Importing the photos from the camera to Photoshop seems to take longer than if simply done via the built in Windows tool.

All in all, this is a great value for those looking to do some video editing and photo editing beyond what the tools included with Windows/Mac OS offer. The programs have some kinks with uploading directly into them, which is why I docked a star, but once you get the settings to your liking the features and editing that can be done is truly astounding for such a cheap and easy to use product. Recommended.

The package came on time and in excellent shape. The Photoshop Elements disk loaded easily. I did not find this software to be as intuitive as Photoshop itself but, Elements is a lesser version. It is okay for use by someone who wants most of their photo adjustments handled essentially automatically at the push of a button. It did a credible job adjusting skin tones and some ligthening. I would not purchase this particular software again. I found it to limiting in the manual adjustment area.

Just purchased the combined Photoshop elements and Premiere elements 7 -- hadn't used a video editor before, so wasn't sure what to expect. Pretty good general functionality -- I've read that none of the video editors are without problems, and found the same with Premiere -- while generally stable, I have had my system (i7 processor w/6G DRAM) lock up 2 or 3 times when in the editor -- found that what seemed to be the most stable arangement was to do a hard boot on my system and start up the application without a bunch of other applications/environments running in the background -- I'm no expert on video applications, but was able to fairly easily download digital video from my camcorder (older tapes I wanted to archive to disk and DVD) and convert the resulting .avi files to DVD movie format and then burn a disk -- beware -- video editing takes a lot of horsepower -- even with my 8 thread i7 system, it takes about 1 1/2 to 2 hours to convert a 1 hour video to DVD