Adobe Appeals to Amateurs with Elements 7

Photoshop and Premiere Elements 7 make it easier for hobbyist photographers and digital video enthusiasts to tune up their snapshots and clips without submerging themselves in manuals for hours.

While professional designers, photographers and videographers await every new release of Adobe’s full-function Photoshop and Premiere editing suites, amateurs received their fill of new features on Tuesday when Adobe released new versions of the consumer-level Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements software packages.

Photoshop Elements 7 adds a number of easy-to-use features for touching up amateur photos. For instance, the Scene Cleaner function allows users to brush away unwanted objects in snapshots, like tourists in the background of a shot, automatically. Similarly, the Smart Brush tool can improve lighting or texture in specific areas of a photo, and Quick Fix tools can help with a number of common tasks, like whitening teeth or brightening blue skies.

Premiere Elements 7 makes it easier for amateur moviemakers to cut and edit home videos in a more professional way. For instance, the complex green-screen effect that usually requires a sophisticated image keying process has been simplified with the new Videomerge feature, which allows a bedroom wall to become the Grand Canyon, the surface of the Moon, or any other keyed-in background. The software will even comb through a block of raw footage detecting faces and marking up clips automatically, then allow inexperienced users to drag their favorite scenes together, add a theme, and produce a polished video painlessly.

Both new software packages offer free basic Photoshop.com membership with purchase, which delivers additional editing elements and tutorials on a regular basis, plus 5GB of storage for projects. Each application will cost $100 on its own, or $150 as a bundle. A Photoshop.com Plus membership that offers 20GB of online storage can be had for $50 annually.