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We review products independently , but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use. Photoshop Elements brings much of the visual magic pioneered by Adobe Photoshop to nonprofessional consumers.
Adobe's consumer photo editing software continues to make splashy Photoshop effects possible for novices to accomplish. Like Adobe's Creative Cloud applications, new features in the version—including art style transfer and warp photos to fit a shape—take advantage of Adobe's AI technology, called Sensei.
With its wealth of tools and ease of use, Photoshop Elements remains a PCMag Editors' Choice winner for enthusiast-level photo editing software. A day trial version is available. Note that the app's installer is not small, at 2.
It runs on Windows 10 version or later, and on Apple macOS versions Since the program already has a ton of photo tools and effects, the update is largely about adding new creative tools, with a handful of interface changes and new basic capabilities included. This effect, made popular several years ago by the Prisma mobile app, lets you give your photo the look of a van Gogh or other artist with one click. Photo Warp. The Photo Warp tool lets you place an image on another object.
For example you could fit a landscape on mirror sunglasses or a portrait onto a coffee mug. Guided Edits. Two new Guided Edits let you create perfect pet photos by correcting the animals' often-shaded faces and extend landscapes using Content-Aware Fill. Automatic Updates. As with so many other apps, Photoshop Elements now updates automatically, but just for the current version. It's not a subscription that provides you with all future major versions.
New choices let you create social posts with text overlays, perfect landscapes complete with enhanced skies , and create duotone images. The version also added support for Adobe Creative Cloud online storage so you can share work between Elements and Creative Cloud apps such as Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop proper.
It also lets you back up the database catalog that keeps track of all your edits. Notable among them are Subject Select, Automatic Colorization, Object Removal, one-click skin smoothing, pattern objects, and the astounding Open Closed Eyes capability.
Adobe has also gradually made improvements to the interface as well as underlying performance and image format support, such as adding support for the HEIC format used by recent Apple iPhones. The main photo editing program is joined by two utilities, the Start window and the Organizer, which you generally pass through before opening the actual editor.
The Start window is not only your portal to both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements , but it also presents some extremely useful features. On it you see tips for how to use new editing tools, links to most recent files you worked on, and Auto Creations—slideshows and collages the program automatically generates from your content. The Organizer application, as its name implies, is where you import, group, tag, and output your photos. You don't have to use it, but it offers a lot of capabilities that would otherwise clutter the main editing application.
Its powerful search, auto curation, and sharing tools can be useful additions to the standard organization tools. Four main mode choices appear at the top of the Organizer's window: Media, People, Places, and Events. The Organizer search bar lets you filter content by people, place, keyword tags, media type, date, and folder.
You can combine search criteria to narrow down the results, too. Smart Tags automatically identify what's in the photo—an animal, a face, a landscape, a flower—following the artificial intelligence and machine learning trend we've seen in Flickr, Google Photos, and OneDrive. This cutting-edge technology saves you from having to explicitly apply tags to photos, though you can still do it yourself if you want more control.
Organizer's Places mode showed my iPhone photos' location based on their embedded GPS data, but the Places section on the Search page told me there were no Places tags to search by—you have to enter location tags manually for anything to show up here.
It's annoying when one part of a program has information that's not accessible in another feature. Also, I prefer the way the built-in photography apps in Windows 10 and macOS let you see a small map in the Info panel while viewing an individual photo. To search based on faces, you must first supply names in the People module. The program detects all faces and tries to match them to any you've already identified, but it's not percent accurate and sometimes is fooled by profiles or weird angles.
It's easy to add photos to a face tag by confirming the program's proposed images. Once you do this, though, you can search for all photos that have Jordan and Max in them, or for all photos with Jordan or Max, which is nifty. Below the search bar is the Auto Curate check box.
The first time I tried to check this, it said Auto Curation was in progress—understandable, since it analyzes your entire photo library. A few minutes later I could see the chosen images, with a slider to increase or decrease the number of photos shown.
The fewer you choose, the higher the quality of the photos that appear. So, for example, you can see what the program thinks are your 50 best photos or your best 10 is the minimum.
The app looks for things like lighting, composition, focus, and even emotional impact. Most of my results understandably included humans, and the tool did turn up a bunch of good shots I'd forgotten about.
You can even apply Auto Curate to a search, so you could find, for example, your best shots of mountains or cats. I have a couple of quibbles with the interface, however. You can't double-click on a photo in Organizer's search results to launch it in the editor. It provides no accommodation for screen sizes other than HD and 4K—I use a QHD p display, so the smaller size is too small and the larger too large.
Further, there's not much special support for touch screens as Photoshop and Lightroom offer, aside from zooming and scrolling with pinching and flicking. Speaking of importing, Photoshop Elements trails other software in the speed of this operation.
I have yet to test import speed on more photo applications on my new work-from-home system for more comparison. After I had Elements import about a couple hundred photos and video clips, the home screen showed me more than a dozen Auto Creations it had produced from my content.
From photos shot around the same area and time, it produced pleasant collages, which benefited from a bit of editing and photo swapping. The feature also produced several slideshows of varying interest from my test media, with effective transitions and backgrounds.
The background music was usually well chosen to fit the image subjects, but it often stopped abruptly, rather than fading out. Some were so short as to be pointless. In any case, the project can provide starting points for your own creativity. Those products group photos from locations and time periods and automatically suggest albums.
Though these don't always hit the mark, they can be a good way to get you started with albums. Photoshop Elements really comes into its own when you move from the Organizer to its full editor app.
The program makes many of Photoshop proper's high-end image manipulation capabilities but without the same degree of difficulty. Many of the tools, particularly content-aware ones that let you do things like remove areas or objects without disrupting the background, are unique to Adobe software.
Elements Effects feel like Instagram squared, with controls that the mobile app simply can't match. The Smart Looks tool chooses an effect based on image analysis, with four variations. These matched the image types of my test shots well. I like how this tool shows your actual image under the influence of the effect, rather than just a sample image, as some programs do. When you choose the crop tool, you see four proposed crops in the bottom panel, based on faces found and other criteria.
It works impressively, framing group photos and suggesting creative looks for landscapes. The crop tool, too, is suitable for many professional use cases, letting you specify standard aspect ratios and even a target size in pixels. Expert mode offers near-Photoshop levels of control, complete with filters, layers, actions the ability to run preset Actions like resizing and effects, not to create them , histograms, and tons of artistic and graphic effects.
As with Photoshop, you get an array of tool buttons along the left, and edited files are saved in Photoshop PSD format. For web producers, there's the Save for Web option, which optimizes that is, reduces the file size of images for online display. These don't appear in the Filter Gallery, but must be chosen from the Filter menu directly, which may be an oversight. That said, they can produce some pretty amazing effects. Expert Mode also has a generous selection of content, such as backgrounds, frames, and shapes to spruce up a photograph.
The Text tool lets you wrap text around a shape, so it doesn't overlap important parts of an image. Character-styling options are far less extensive than those in Photoshop, however. Select Subject is simply a button that appears at the bottom panel when you're using the selection brush; it's also available from the Select menu. It worked admirably on all but photos with backgrounds that blended in with the subject using similar colors.
The Recompose tool is one of the program's most impressive features, letting you change the aspect ratio of an image without stretching or squashing faces and the like. You can even remove selected objects and mark others for preserving. Recompose did a good job letting me move my big head closer to a friend without distorting a test picture, though I did have to crop the photo to remove a duplicate head.
You can also do standard Photoshop things, such as blur, sharpen, and add imagery. There's a good selection of clip art, too. The spot-healing brush does an excellent job at removing blemishes. I also removed a sign in the background of a photo by brushing in the texture from a forest in the image with the healing brush. When you open a raw file from a DSLR or high-end mirrorless camera , the program starts out in a separate Adobe Camera Raw window, where you have access to color, exposure, and detail, controls.
It does include Adobe's raw Profiles—such as Color, Portrait, and Vivid—along with noise reduction, but Elements has no chromatic aberration correction. There are also lens distortion corrections, but they don't use profiles to base automatic corrections on your equipment the way Lightroom and DxO PhotoLab do.
The raw importer has red-eye reduction and cropping, which seems like an unnecessary duplication of what's in the editor app. Most portrait photographers are adept at smoothing skin, and Element's Smooth Skin enhancement is designed to simplify the process.
It identifies faces, overlays a circle—not an ellipse—and lets you smooth or blur the area; you can adjust the intensity of the smoothing. It's a quick fix, but I think you're better off applying Gaussian blur to a selection or using the Spot Healing brush. The Adjust Facial Features tool is accessible from the Enhance menu.
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