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.
