Premiere Elements 15
Get to grips with fixing, editing and sharing video
£79.10 FROM Adobe, adobe.com/uk needs OS X 10.10 or higher
Many of our digital devices are capable of shooting both photos and video, but this can lead to
asset management challenges. One of Premiere Element 15’s strengths is that it works with Photoshop Elements via the Elements Organizer. The Organizer lets you import and view both stills and clips, and add keywords and ratings to help you find your favourite files fast. If you need to fix, edit and share video clips then you can open Premiere Elements from the Organizer and quickly get down to work.
The Premiere Elements workspace looks similar to that of Photoshop Elements. It even features a Guided Edit mode that takes the video novice step by step through various video editing procedures. This is a great way to explore some of the advanced tools in the Expert workspace, such as adding creative ‘pop colour’ effects that reduce a shot to monochrome while concurrently preserving the colour of a specific object.
You can overcome a video’s exposure and colour problems in Premiere Elements in similar ways to Photoshop. For example, Photoshop Elements 14 introduced a haze removal feature designed to reveal more of a distant object’s washed out colours and tones. This tool is in Premiere Elements 15 as an automatic drag-and-drop effect, and you can manually fine-tune the haze correction using sliders. While the haze removal effect works well, it’s arguably a bit of an unnecessarily gimmicky tool, since atmospheric haze can often help add atmosphere, depth and contrast to a landscape.
Familiar faces
Premiere Elements now enjoys the ability to recognise people in your video clips. This helps its Smart Trim feature automatically remove problem sections while prioritising the moments featuring friends and family. You can also use facial recognition to quickly add rostrum camera moves to photos. The Pan and Zoom tool automatically builds in camera moves that pan and zoom from one face to the next, which is a handy time-saving way to bring your photos to life.
Normally a music track would cut out randomly as soon as the timeline’s video track ends. The new Remix feature analyses the music track and cuts it into segments so that it will end on a more appropriate moment in the song. This feature sounds a bit gimmicky but actually works surprisingly well.
The Video Collage tool provides a quick way to drag clips and stills into template windows so that they play on the screen at the same time. This is a creative and entertaining way to share holiday memories. Once you’ve finished you can easily share them online to Facebook or YouTube for the world to enjoy.
Guided Edit mode takes the video novice step by step through video editing procedures