Product Description

Bring out the best in your photos:

Bring your home videos to life:

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7926 in Software
• Brand: Adobe
• Model: 29180251
• Released on: 2006-09-29
• Platform: Windows XP
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 5.00 pounds

Features

• PHSP & PREM ELEMENTS 3 WIN RETAIL

Customer Reviews

Great package for video/slide shows and graphics
I am a big fan of Photoshop Elements--the power of this graphics program lets me do nearly anything in digital graphics with the exception of setting up color for commercial printing (for that, you need full-bore Photoshop, which has CMYK and other color set up for printing.) I've used this program since version 1.0 and, with your computer properly configured for video memory and RAM, you can really do a lot.

Now Adobe has added "Premier Elements"--which is the video manipulation features you've been wanting. Now, I have limited video capability (no web cam, a digicam that does short avi's ) but I actually do make slide shows quite a bit to demonstrate art techniques. I found that Premier Elements makes it very easy for me to create a simple but stylish video that can be exported to Quicktime or Windows media formats or to movie formats. From absolute beginner to finished first video (an art show for Youtube), it maybe took me 30 minutes. Now, I can create one in about five to ten minutes.

The Premier Elements workspace looks a bit different than the Elements graphical workspace, but the look and feel is familiar enough that a user of Elements will feel relatively at home. There is an ADD MEDIA (plus sign) button. After setting up a project name, I clicked this and added stills in jpeg format from my picture folder. I then created titles in the Title screen. There are pre-made titles you can use, with themes like birthdays, sports, business, or you can make your own. You can choose to have your titles fade, scroll or stay still.

To put the preview video together, I just ordered the stills by dragging them from the media box into the timeline below. Need the stills longer? Click and drag with the mouse and a red bracket shows where you are extending the time. Frame by frame can be shown by zooming in (simply click the Equal sign) or can be hidden by zooming out (hit the Minus sign.)

In between the frames, you can add transitions like fade, spiral, shutter, pixelate, additive or subtractive dissolve. You hit the Effects symbol and drag your transition choice between the frames you choose. Simple. Hate the effect, previewed in your monitor box? Just hit Undo.

Then you can add music by adding a mpeg or other audio format file to your media box. Then drag it below in the sound section of the timeline (shown by a speaker icon.) Shorten it or lengthen it with the click-and-drag of the mouse. Export this to your format and Lo--you have made a video. You can add features like timing frame change to points in the music, and there are a lot of other features to add special effects.

I found this software intuitive and easy to use. It helps to be able to go from Elements (where you might be manipulating a picture or clip) directly to Premier. A great package, and one that should be useful to most anyone at home or in the office. Big thumbs up.

Photoshop Elements is Poor, Premier is Aweful.
I like the design of Photoshop Elements, but once you get more than a few thousand photos into it, it starts to slow down, eat memory and get into very long lag times. The main reason to not buy Adobe Photoshop Elements though, is that Google has a program that is very similar in design, but much better made. It's called Picasa and best of all, it's free. (Do a Google Search for "Picasa")

Premier Elements however, is aweful. I hope someone can recommend a good alternative because Premier Elements is about as good as a car that doesn't steer very well and is missing the brakes.

I forgave Adobe when it didn't run on an Athlon XP, even though this CPU is not that old... I installed it on a new Core II Duo Dell laptop to get around that.

I forgave partly when I lost hours of work to a crash that shouldn't have happened... The crash was due to an Adobe bug, but I had to take some blame for failing to save. I was surprised to find that auto save was set to the default 10 minutes though, as it sure seemed like I lost more than that.

So, I set the auto-save to 5 minutes... In fact, I started seeing the "Saving" progress bar start showing up about every 5 minutes. Then it crashed again today.. I thought I was covered, but after relaunching all my work was lost. Again, I though maybe I was doing something wrong. So I looked in the folder structure and found an "Auto-Saves" folder. It even had some very recent "project files". But guess what... I opened the most recent of them and found that none of my changes for today were there.

So aside from the unnecessarily complicated user interface, slow performance, and severe instability (all shown to be Adobe's fault by testing on multiple systems with no difference in behavior), this software will also throw out hours of your work after pretending to let you save it.

This is so bad that I am going to take another serious look at finding valid alternatives for my other Adobe software. I used to think Abode was one of the better companies. But this shows that they are willing to release dangerous junk... How can I ever trust them again?

DISAPPOINTED!
I never recieved this item I purchased.Wrote so many e-mails and the seller never responded. Even called and no one called me back. I WILL NEVER do business with them again! I am very disappointed and desire greatly a full refund of $25.94!