Adobe has announced two upgrades to its consumer digital photo and video software -- Photoshop Elements 6 for Windows and Premiere Elements 4 for Windows.
Available separately or together in a single retail package, Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements software provide photo and video enthusiasts more creative ways to organize, edit, create and share digital photos and home movies.
Photoshop Elements 6 features new Photomerge technology to help solve the challenge of taking the perfect group photo by combining the best facial expressions and body language from a series of shots to create a single new cohesive group shot. The new Quick Selection Tool reduces a once time-consuming select-and-adjust task to a single click. Three edit modes feature -- each geared toward a different experience level and a new Guided Edit mode helps walk users through the steps of improving a photo.
Photoshop Elements 6 streamlines editing with clean, uncluttered screens that bring focus to the photo and new tabs provide simple access to the program's capabilities. Additional enhancements include an improved conversion tool that converts color images into elegant, nuanced black-and-whites, while the streamlined Organizer speeds performance and eases importing, tagging and retrieving.
The same Organizer features in Premiere Elements 4, helping users to sort video clips and still photos with visual tagging options for people, places, or events. Video enthusiasts can apply comprehensive movie themes to a sequence of scenes in just a few clicks, creating a movie complete with transitions, effects and DVD menu. Background music and sound effects help underscore emotions, add emphasis, or create a mood. The new Audio Mixer works like a mixing board in a recording studio, adjusting the relative volumes of different audio with sliders. The new Sharing Center centralizes available ways to show off videos. Users can upload and share videos in multiple ways, including Blu-ray disc, the Web, and mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone.
Videos also can be exported in a video format based on Adobe Flash to Web sites such as YouTube, without requiring any special encoding.
Photoshop Elements 6 & Premiere Elements 4 for Windows is available as a bundle at an estimated street price of AUD$235 or separately for an estimated street price of AUD$159 each. Photoshop Elements for the Macintosh platform is expected in early 2008.
