Since the core software is from the Adobe Photoshop team, you get the same excellent color rendering and implementation quality that Photoshop users have come to expect. Missing are some of the advanced analytics and the 3D capabilities of Photoshop Creative Cloud, but most Photoshop users don’t need those anyway. Most of the same plug-ins, including the popular Google-owned Nik suite, work just like they do in Photoshop. Powerful image editingĮlements is chock full of most of the same filters and image editing commands you probably use in Photoshop.

On a large monitor like my primary 30-inch monster, that places them quite far away from the Tool icons and the rest of the commands they are used with. Tool Options and other common commands are pinned to the very bottom of the Elements window, for example. My one gripe with the somewhat simplified UI that Elements offers is its lack of flexibility. In many cases when I was trying to figure out how to achieve a particular effect, I found switching to Guided mode and looking for a recipe a faster solution than digging through the help files or searching the web. First, it is a great way to learn how to do more complex tasks in the program, and second it extends what you can do by yourself simply using the built-in commands. The innovative Guided mode serves two purposes. Initially I assumed I’d skip right to Expert mode and stay there, but some of the features in the Quick mode are great for productivity - especially the integrated Before and After display shown next to a sidebar of common image enhancement tasks. Elements offers three different modes, Quick, Guided, and Expert, that you can flip between at the click of a mouse.

Adobe premiere elements 12