Maximum PC elements RSS Feed

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and Premiere Elements 4

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:11:25 -0600

We’ve closely watched the Elements kids since their birth, and though we’ve generally been pleased with their development, we’re a bit concerned about Adobe Premiere’s and Photoshop’s offspring. While Photoshop Elements 6 continues to impress us and we’re sure she’s on her way to an Ivy League school and a happy life as a doctor, Premiere Elements has us worried.

First, the good news. Photoshop Elements is a darling. Now fully matured, she’s able to pull off some truly useful tasks, including merging a handful of bad group photos into one good photo simply by selecting a base image. You then pick and choose faces from other photos and Elements merges them into one perfect group photo. The new Quick Selection tool allows you to choose sections of an image based on nearby colors, so you can easily change the color of an object without having to use other selection tools.

Not all the new features are practical though. One new trick, the ability to merge portrait photos, lets you do such useful things as blend the eyebrows from mom and the mullet from dad onto another person’s image. While neat to play around with, you’re unlikely to actually use this feature more than once.

Many of Photoshop Elements’s other enhancements come in the organization and sharing department. While good for anal-retentive types, color us unimpressed because they don’t help those who already have huge photo libraries.

But enough about that overachiever. Premiere Elements, which we gushed about at version 2, hasn’t developed as quickly as his sibling. When he turned 3, he couldn’t display HDV content while it was being captured. He also couldn’t detect scenes when capturing high-def content. Now turning 4, Premiere Elements can finally display HDV content and detect scenes, but he doesn’t understand the AVCHD format—something other kids in his grade can do.

Subpar performance and low-resolution previews make Premiere Elements 4.0 a disappointing update.

Premiere Elements, once quick on his feet, feels sluggish even on modern hardware. Also annoying: Video previews are disturbingly pixelated. Adobe says it’s the side effect of an “improvement” it made to its video-scaling algorithms. “Unfortunately, these algorithm changes unintentionally affected the preview resolution, which appears different when a clip or photo has a different resolution than the project resolution. Users can work around this issue by first rendering the clips that have a different resolution from the project,” explained an Adobe spokesperson. The upshot is that previews are unacceptably bad.

We also had issues creating still-image slide shows—they looked choppy. But it was actually that little do-gooder Photoshop Elements’s fault. One of Premiere’s recommended newbie ways to create a slide show is with the photo organizer in Photoshop Elements. Unfortunately, the tool is crap. We achieved more satisfactory slide shows using Premiere Elements’s native (albeit far more complicated) still-image support.

Not everything is bad here. Elements does have some niceties, such as top-notch titling and better online file-sharing capabilities—and that freeze-frame button is still handy. The stock title menus and art are also superior to that of other products. The interface is also tweaked to be friendlier to newbs, with easier access to guides that walk you through tasks and improved media catalog management.

As a pair, Photoshop Elements carries the water for the underperforming Premiere Elements. As a stand-alone product, Photoshop Elements 6 would garner a 9 verdict, but being bundled with Premiere weighs the package down.

Better Photo Transfers for Windows Vista

Mark Soper — Mon, 21 May 2007 15:53:56 -0500

I really like using the Scanner and Camera Wizard (SCW) in Windows XP (and yes, it was originally developed for Windows Me!). SCW makes organizing digital photos easy, because you can select the pictures you want to transfer from your camera or flash memory card reader, name them, and copy them to a folder of your choice (by default, the name you assign to the picture group).

Unfortunately, SCW just hasn't kept up with the times. When you use it to transfer large pictures (5MP and higher), it's painfully slow to display the thumbnail images you use to select the photos you want to transfer. Thus, it's not surprising that SCW's been replaced in Windows Vista.

Even worse, its Vista replacement, the Importing Pictures and Videos wizard, is an annoying case of "one step forward, two steps backward."

What's good: optional picture tagging during transfer; automatically rotating pictures during transfer; displaying pictures in the Windows Photo Gallery (one of my favorite new Vista features); picture transfer from USB thumb drives.

What's bad: no way to select only certain photos for transfer; slow transfer times.

I know the list of good features is longer than the list of bad features, but trust me: if you use a digital camera, you want more control over image storage and naming than Importing Pictures and Videos gives you.

Free, Fast, and Fun – Picasa2

If you're a bargain-hunter (how does "free" sound?), try Google's Picasa2. Picasa2 displays the photos on your media (including USB flash drives) in a hurry and lets you select the pictures you want to transfer. During the 'blink-and-you'll-miss-it' transfer process, Picasa can name the pictures, the destination folder and add caption and location information you specify.

Power at a (Low) Price – Adobe Photoshop Elements' Photo Downloader

For more control over the transfer process, use the Photo Downloader in Adobe Photoshop Elements 5. The basic transfer process (which also works with USB flash drives) is comparable to Vista's Importing Pictures and Videos wizard, but it's faster. However, open the Advanced Dialog and you can specify author, copyright, file and folder name, add a tag, automatically fix red-eye, and (as with SCW and Picasa) you can select the photos you want to transfer.

If you prefer other photo editing programs, check the feature list for file transfer programs you can use instead of Importing Pictures and Videos.

SyncToy – Fast File Transfers for Purists

If you'd rather transfer your pictures now (fast!) and organize them later, don't overlook Microsoft's free SyncToy (starting with version 1.4, it works with 32-bit Vista editions as well as Windows XP). SyncToy lets you set up your choice of five different synchronization settings between any two folders on your system. Because any particular digital camera uses a consistent folder naming scheme, you can use SyncToy with your digital camera (if it is assigned a disk drive letter by Vista), with your camera's removable flash memory inserted into a card reader, or with USB flash drives. You can't rename your pictures or tag them, but for speed and the ability to preview what happens to your files, it's hard to beat SyncToy.

So, if you're grinding your teeth waiting for Importing Pictures and Videos to work its way through your digital pix, don't settle for it: you have better choices, and some of them are free!

Adobe Photoshop Elements with Premiere Elements

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:45:53 -0600

The newest update to Photoshop Elements 4.0 is just a bunny hop forward from the previous iteration. Adobe really sweetens the deal, however, by bundling the home-user edition of Photoshop with the home-user version of Premiere—Premiere Elements 2.0.

Don’t take that to mean that Photoshop Elements doesn’t get any worthwhile new features; there are quite a few, including some that had even our designers’ mouths watering. But the more noteworthy update is to Premiere Elements. While Premiere Elements 1.0 was a decent 1.0 version, it was a rough product.

The most noticeable change to version 2.0 of Premiere Elements is the removal of the surfeit of palettes that Adobe normally buries you under. With Premiere Elements 2.0, as you grow or shrink particular palettes, the other palettes adjust accordingly. It’s a nice touch that we’d like to see in other Adobe products.

Premiere Elements 2.0 also now lets you create your own DVD menu templates. You can set your background video or image and customize text but, sadly, button editing is verboten, as are edits to the graphical overlays used for the templates. The templates themselves, however, are quite polished and exhibit none of the general cheesiness you find in competing products. The titling capability of the program is also enhanced and the stock of included Adobe fonts is pretty spectacular.

The real gem of Premiere Elements 2.0 is its performance. Because it’s based on Adobe’s pro-level Premiere Pro 1.5 engine, Premiere Elements sings—just sings—with today’s hardware. If you’re running a dual-processor or dual-core machine, Premiere Elements’ multithreaded engine chews through video in a way that will make any hardware-head giggle with joy. Several of the video transactions are rendered on the GPU as well, for additional speed.

Rev 2 also allows you to import video using High Speed USB with cameras that support the interface (FireWire is also supported), and the app can encode audio to the space-saving Dolby Digital 2.0 codec instead of using uncompressed PCM audio. Adobe also catches up to the competition by letting you import VOB files for editing. The VOBs must be unencrypted, though—so you won’t be able to edit Sophia Copola out of The Godfather III, but you can re-import your movies once you’ve burned them to DVD.

With Photoshop Elements, Adobe mostly polishes the award-winning image-editing app. You still get a good taste of Photoshop without any of the pro-oriented pre-press stuff. The most notable changes are the skin-tone tool that lets you easily tweak skin tone in images, and the Magic Extractor. Every old Photoshop-hand knows what a daunting task it can be to clip images from photos; with the Magic Extractor, you easily separate your cat, kid, or car from the background. A similar tool called Magic Selection Brush lets you easily select objects. Both tools are far from perfect, but even if you think the Magic Lasso should be used exclusively by Wonder Woman, you’ll be able to clip and edit like a Photoshop pro.

Where Photoshop Elements 4.0 is lacking is in performance. Next to its multithreaded sibling, we found ourselves waiting an inordinate amount of time for Magic Extractor to complete. Admittedly our test clip is complex, but we were testing on a machine with four CPU cores and 4GB of RAM. Uninspiring performance doesn’t outweigh the positives of the program, but after coming off a hardware high from Premiere Elements 2.0, the lack of any real multithreading was a bummer.

Purchased separately, the apps would total $200, but as a bundle you get both for $150. That might still seem like a lot, but between the pair, you’ll be able to handle 95 percent of the image and movie chores you’ll ever be tasked with.

Month Reviewed: March 2006

+ 8MM: Dual-core and GPU support in Premiere Elements.

- VHS: Adobe Photo Downloader can be quite annoying.

VERDICT: 9
kickass=yes

URL: www.adobe.com