Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 & Premiere Elements 9 (Win/Mac)
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 & Premiere Elements 9 (Win/Mac)
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 & Adobe Premiere Elements 9 software makes it easy to create extraordinary photos and incredible movies
- Create extraordinary photos and quickly share them in unique cards, scrapbook pages, photo books, Online Albums, and more
- Make incredible home movies with professional-quality effects and sound, and share them on disc, the web, and virtually anywhere else
- Creatively combine photos and videos to tell entertaining stories, and easily upload to Facebook
- Automatically organize all your photos and video clips from one convenient place
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 & Adobe Premiere Elements 9 Software delivers powerful options that make it easy to use photos and videos together and share in entertaining ways. Show off photos and videos together in dynamic Online Albums or quickly upload to Facebook. You’ll find plenty of options to help you share your memories with family and friends everywhere. Now enjoy a complete solution for photos and videos whether you use Microsoft® Windows® or Mac OS. Great value! The #1 selling
List Price: $ 149.99
Price: $ 110.99
MMC
5 May, 2011
Powerful Image Editing. Amazing Price.,
I grudgingly purchased Elements 9 because I wanted to use some of the photoshop brushes and files that I could not use with my old favorite program Paint Shop Pro 8. I had held out as long as I could, but finally, my stubbornness was holding me back from getting things done. I tried Gimp, but I just did not like the interface. It was buggy as heck. I’ve used the professional versions of Photoshop, and I knew that this version of Elements 9 was sort of “in sync” with the Pro version. So, I would feel familiar when moving up from Elements to (InDesign or CS5 or whatever it is right now). Now that I am using Elements, I wish switched over from Jasc PSP to Adobe Elements years ago. They both have layers, but wow, what you can do in Element’s layers is mind boggling. There is the misconception out there, I think, that photoshop Elements is just a “photo organizer” … or just for people touching up their family photos. This is absolutely incorrect. The program is a full on graphic editing program. I’ve only been working with it for a week or so, but as far as I can tell, I could build an entire website, slice it up, and optimize it for the web, just with Adobe Elements 9 alone.
I really purchased this for the Premiere 9 Video Editing Program, and figured I might as well make the switch over to Elements 9 while I’m at it, so I purchased the bundle. Strangely enough, I’ve been enjoying the graphics program so much, I haven’t even started a video project yet with Premiere Elements! I do have some feedback though, on the subject, that is important for others. After installing Premiere Elements 9, I tried to open the program and open up a project and immediately started getting errors about my Nvidia Graphics Driver. I had the latest drivers, but still spent hours troubleshooting and updating drivers, dealing with Adobe support. In the end, the problems seems to have been that my computer hardware was not enough to run the program. I was running Windows XP, Nvidia GE Force 6150le on board graphics card, I think my computer only had 1 GB of Ram altogether. It wasn’t a huge deal to me, because I suspected that my computer was going to get maxed out soon, especially now that I was getting into video editing.
So, I was in the mindset that I was going to be needing to upgrade the computer soon and this experience gave me some guidelines on what I needed for video work: a graphics card with at least 1 GB ram of it’s own and at least 4 .. preferrably 8 or 12 GB ram for the computer memory. I did some homework and found a good site called videoguy dot com (I think) who gives some very clear guidelines for a good workhorse setup. I added up what it would cost for me to upgrade my current HP computer with a better video card, and max out the ram to 4GB, and then I would have to add a better power source for the fan to keep it cool. I was better off retiring the old computer to lighter duty, and getting a computer that could handle the job for years to come. So, when I installed the Premiere Elements on the Windows 7 computer and opened a new project, it flew open without a hitch, ready to go! Unfortunately, I am so engrossed in my Photoshop Elements graphics projects, I have no interest in doing any videos right now!
One last comment about Elements… I did spend $25 on a month at Lynda dot com so that I could work through the awesome tutorials there. (I love Lynda dot com) If I hadn’t done that, I might have felt lost. I also have found many amazing tutorials on youTube just by searching for Photoshop Elements 9 and you can see all the powerful things you never imagined you could do with this great piece of software.
To sum it up: For under $100 this software is an awesome deal. I think the the Elements program will work on any decent computer. It’s worth the time it takes to learn all the powerful tools built into it.
Premiere Elements: if your are bored with the built-in Windows Movie Maker, like I was, then moving up to a more feature rich video editor might also mean moving up to a more powerful computer. Video editing, is a memory hungry process. Adobe should be a little more up front about the hardware requirements, maybe. But, you are going to be miserable, if you have “just enough to make do.” I had a little time to play with the titles and captions and a few other tools and those things alone are enough to make me glad I spent the money on this software. I’m very happy with this purchase. And I feel like when I spoke to support at Adobe, they were extremely helpful and honest with me. A good experience. I’m glad I bought this.
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|J. Harley
5 May, 2011
Hooray for Photoshop, boo for Premiere,
This is the first time Premiere Elements is Mac compatible. This bundle program ships with four disks (two per OS). It no longer ships with stand-alone Premiere and Photoshop disks. Both apps are now installed from the same disk. I decided to go with the PC version because because I already have Final Cut Express, iMovie, and Photoshop CS5 installed on my Mac. After installing both apps on my PC, I fired up Premiere Elements 9 first and was greeted with an error message for my Nvidia display driver. In other words, I basically picked up right where Elements 8 left off. The error read: “We have detected an incompatible display adapter. To get a better and faster playback performance, please update your display driver”. Nice… especially considering I’m already running the latest available driver, so I guess I’m stuck with this message and the resulting errors, (and it didn’t take long for the errors to appear). I figured I’d try out capture first. I already had a pretty good idea of capture capability with HDV and ACVHD from PE8, so I decided to try the “Flip” capture option in v9. I connected and powered on my Flip camera. I also had a USB drive plugged into a different port on the PC. I planned to pull photos from the USB drive and videos from the Flip. Bad idea. After I connected and selected the Flip import option, I was prompted to install several additional Windows components. It seemed odd, but I did it anyway. Afterwards, PE9 read video from the thumb drive instead of the Flip. That’s what the additional components were for. I had to disconnect the thumb drive to get the program to recognize the Flip. I finally downloaded a few Flip clips and luckily didn’t have to endure the dreaded “analyzing” phase that I hated so much in version 8 of PE. I then tried to edit, but had nothing but glitches and problems. None of the preview windows worked during capture or editing. I could only hear sound. To add insult to injury, even the sound dropped roughly 1/4 of the way into previewing a clip. By that point, I’d already had enough and realized that I’m pretty much done with Premier Elements until they resolve the many annoying issues.
Photoshop Elements 9 seems pretty identical as version 8, although performance has improved slightly. Creating a slide show no longer brings my PC to its knees. There are a few new creative options, like enhancement of the spot healing brush, and more automated special effects tasks, all with accompanying lessons. There are also new online sharing options, particularly for social sites. Unless you really want or need the new creative options, I would say hold off on upgrading if you have version 8. The new effects and slight performance increase, while welcome, don’t merit an upgrade just yet. The navigation for both apps is also still a bit goofy in places.
Once upon a time (like 5 years ago), Adobe Premiere Elements was the best choice for home video editing. While I feel Photoshop Elements is still a top contender compared to the competition, Premiere Elements has taken a nosedive over the years. The continued issues with Nvidia cards (I encountered Nvidia compatibility issues in both version 8 and version 9) is completely unacceptable. Premiere Elements 8 worked much better on my prior PC with an ATI GPU, but the fact is, there are a lot of PCs with Nvidia GPUs out there. This needs to be fixed, quickly and for good. In the meantime, if you have an Nvidia card, approach Premiere Elements (8 or 9) with extreme caution or just steer clear. After this release, I’m moving into the latter group because I’m not in the mood to go hunting for updated drivers or patches every time Adobe releases a new version of Premiere Elements, nor should we have to. Although I’m not interested in installing either app on my Mac (due to better options already installed), it may be of interest to Mac owners that Premier is now Mac compatible. It does offer an alternative to iMovie or Final Cut Express. If you currently only have iLife for photo/video editing, Photoshop Elements is definitely a better option than iPhoto on Mac. However, I would strongly suggest holding off on trying Premiere on Mac until reading some feedback from Mac users first. Although I didn’t risk installing it on my Mac, The Windows version of Premiere has me so skittish at this point, I don’t know that I even trust it in OSX.
I was really hoping the Elements 9 bundle would correct the bad taste left by the Elements 8 bundle. Unfortunately, it’s back to the drawing board for Adobe. In all fairness, if I could rate Photoshop Elements alone, I’d give it four stars. But this is a bundle, so I have to rate it based on total value, and unfortunately, Premiere is dragging that value down like a lead weight. Skip the bundle, go for Photoshop Elements alone. For a while, I was hoping Adobe could make Premiere Elements the “premier”…
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|Cute Chihuahua
5 May, 2011
Powerful tools for photo and video editing, makes movie making easier, fairly easy to learn how to use,
You can very quickly import all your photos and video and it will even automatically fix red eye in each photograph as it imports them into the program.
After importing your photos you can tell it to find people for tagging and it will show you people and ask you to name them. Once you have named everyone in your photos the program will recognize the person in the future. It allows you to search by person and see all photos that include that person. You can also tag pictures with the name of a place, event or date and sort your pictures that way as well. If your digital camera dates the pictures then you can view all pictures in a time line which is pretty cool instead of all being random.
By running the auto analyzer you can improve your pictures one at a time or you can also tell it to change a large group at once. You can fix red eye and adjust color, sharpness and contrast. It takes some time for it to modify large numbers of pictures and it will keep the original picture and the revised copy. Then you can go through and keep which of the two you like better. I found the auto analyzer to be a hit or miss. Half of the time it would improve the pictures and the other half it would make them worse. It seems to always do a good job of improving background images like buildings, grass, flowers and trees. It also seemed to work well on pictures of my pets. However it has some problem with pictures of people. It will sometimes make it look like you have a tan in spots when you really don’t so I am not real fond of this option.
This program gives you the option to back-up your pictures and videos to your hard drive, removable drive, burn to a disc or even save them online. It will give you 2GB of online storage space for free or you can pay for extra space. There is also an option to order prints from Shutterfly or Kodak. I usually use Snapfish so I won’t use this option. There is so much you can do that I can’t possibly cover it all.
The video editing tools are very nice and fairly easy to use after acquainting yourself with the controls. I have both a Flip Mino HD and a Creative Labs Vado 3rd generation camcorder and I often take short clips of video. This program will allow you to combine and optimize your videos for a more enjoyable viewing experience. I took me a few days to get the hang of video editing and I am still learning but I like what I have been able to do so far. You can create your own DVD just like one that you would purchase from the store. You can even create disc menus for a professional looking DVD. You can cut and remove sections of video that you don’t like. You can even edit the audio or add a soundtrack with your favorite music. It will even format the video depending on what you will use it for. For example there is a different format for posting a video to a website than for video that will be burned to a DVD.
I really like this program. It allows you to do a lot without the hassle and headache of learning some of the more complicated programs out there. The only thing that I don’t like is that it can be a little on the slow side to do various tasks like analize pictures and videos.
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