Adobe Photoshop Elements
Latest
Adobe announces Photoshop Elements 12 & Premiere Elements 12
Adobe has announced the next generation of its consumer photography and video-editing apps. The company took the wraps off of Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 and Adobe Premiere Elements 12 tonight. The apps have traditionally been aimed at the "hobbyist" market, and the latest version of each plays the increasing importance of mobile devices for those users, with the advent of mobile integration that makes it easy to wirelessly share your photos and videos between your iPhone and Adobe's desktop apps. TUAW will have reviews of both apps soon, but for now check out the full list of new features included in the latest versions below. NEW PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS 12 FEATURES Mobile Connectivity -- With Elements Mobile Albums, consumers now have full mobile integration to view and share photos across their devices via Adobe® RevelTM, and publish and share to Private Web Albums. Content-Aware Move -- This exclusive Adobe technology lets customers easily move objects within a photo and automatically fills in resulting empty spaces. Straighten Tool -- Now fills in missing edges through the use of exclusive Content-Aware technology. Auto Smart Tone -- Exclusive intelligent software that learns customer preferences, resulting in one-click adjustments based on their choices. Quick Frames, Effects and Textures -- One-click photo frames, effects and textures, inspired by the most popular looks customers have been creating in Expert mode. Guided Edits -- Step-by-step instructions to create Zoom Burst and Photo Puzzle effects, as well as Restore Old Photo, which enables users to restore damaged or old photos. Pet Eye Correction -- Added in response to customer requests, Pet Eye provides an easy solution to the problem of flash reflection in animals' eyes, which is not addressed by Red Eye correction technology. 64-bit support for Mac -- Allows for more efficient use of built-in memory, maximizing performance and enabling larger image files and videos to be edited quickly. NEW PREMIERE ELEMENTS 12 FEATURES Mobile Connectivity -- With Elements Mobile Albums, consumers now have full mobile integration to view and share videos across their devices via Adobe® RevelTM, and publish and share to Private Web Albums. Auto Smart Tone -- The same exclusive technology found in Photoshop Elements 12. Scores -- More than 50 soundtracks that automatically regenerate to fit the duration of a clip, making it easy to create home movies with perfectly timed intros, outros and background music. Sound Effects -- More than 250 effects that add excitement and dimension to audio tracks. Guided Edits -- Step-by-step navigation on how to get started, trim frames, add scores, transitions, titles and narrations, as well as animating graphics and creating pictures within pictures. Film Looks -- Four new filters add stylized Hollywood flare to home movies including Comic, Trinity, Yesteryear and Cross Process.
Consumer alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud: practical software choices
Yesterday, Adobe introduced Creative Cloud, an on-line subscription based suite with $49.99 monthly charges that moves into the Creative Suite subscription space first started back in 2011. Existing customers of CS 3 to CS 5.5 and academics will pay $29.99 per month. Both Adobe and Microsoft are exploring subscription models in place of buy-once-then-use purchases. This has a number of us here at TUAW looking around to see what apps we might want to jump to as we move away from our premium products into the current marketplace. Although I am fond of Adobe Photoshop Elements, the consumer-priced version of Adobe's flagship photo editor, it's an app with walls. I accomplish far more using Photoshop and the other Creative Suite products, items I have spent years upgrading at considerable expense. Like many other Adobe customers, I live in the hazy world that stretches between Pro apps at one and and Consumer grade at the other. I've purchased CS because the consumer products aren't powerful enough for my needs, but I'm certainly not a full time "creative" who thinks of the suite as merely an incidental purchase. As a rule, I have upgraded as infrequently as possible, stretching out my purchases over as many years and operating systems as possible. I live very low on the Adobe consumer hierarchy, trying to eke out whatever time I have left with my CS 4 suite. It's time now to seriously look at alternatives. On the photo editing side of things, we propose three candidates. Acorn ($29.99) is on sale throughout May. Called the "Image Editor for Humans", it comes with great word of mouth and growing buzz. At just $14.99, Pixelmator's price point can't be beat. This "inspiring, easy-to-use, beautifully designed image editor" has somewhat mixed reviews on the Mac App Stores, but those who love it seem to do so passionately. GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, has a lock on price. For years, this free app has been a stepping-stone app for people who didn't yet have the cash for Photoshop but who wanted access to powerful image editing. As for the rest of the suite, we TUAWians mostly use Acrobat, Illustrator, and InDesign: With Acrobat, you need look no further than Preview for an app that offers many similar features. Power users, however, may want to consider PDFPen Pro, a product we've covered in the past, which offers extensive PDF editing features. Illustrator users will find a variety vector drawing solutions for OS X including Vector Designer, Intaglio, Sketch, and EazyDraw. TUAW recently looked at EazyDraw. For page layout, Apple offers both Pages and iBooks Author. Swift Publisher from Belight seems to offer good word of mouth as well. Speaking of pages, both iWork and Apache's OpenOffice provide promising alternatives to Microsoft Office. GigaOM recently posted an excellent list of their take on Adobe Creative Suite alternatives. Got another alternative vendor to suggest for Creative Suite or Office products? Drop a note in the comments with your suggestion. TUAW will be reviewing many of these alternative apps over the coming weeks.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 available for pre-order
Adobe announced this week that Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac is available for pre-order. Do you prefer to try before you buy? If you're going to be at next week's Macworld Expo, visit the Adobe booth. They'll have a demo version running for you to play with.I'm a fan of PS Elements. I'm no artist or photographer, so Elements does everything I need (and it's a heck of a lot cheaper that Photoshop).Elements 6 will require Mac OS 10.4.8 or higher, and is priced at US$89.99[Via MacMinute]
Adobe Photoshop Elements delayed until 2008
Sometimes it seems like you can always count on Adobe to disappoint. Today they released Photoshop Elements 6 for Windows, but according to Macworld the Mac version will have to wait until "early 2008." This is because the two versions are on "different development schedules." The Mac version of Elements has long been missing some features from the Windows side (particularly in image management), so perhaps this is not surprising. Nonetheless, it's sad to note that as long as we were waiting for a Universal version of Photoshop, this means that Elements will end up taking nearly a year longer still! Fortunately, I suppose, you could just give the newly released Pixelmator a try instead and not worry about it.
