Adobe Premiere Elements 2023
Turn raw footage into slick stories for your social media feeds
Premiere Elements 2023 enables you to add creative effects to clips, which should make the app attractive to creators of social media content
£86.56 FROM adobe.com NEEDS macOS 11, macOS 12 (12.4 or later)
As a simplified version of Adobe’s Premiere Pro software, Premiere Elements 2023 is an entry-level non-linear (NLE) editing app that’s designed to help video makers edit, fix and share their video footage as polished programmes, complete with post-production assets such as titles and transitions. It also enables you to add creative effects to your clips to make them look more eye-catching, which should make the app attractive to creators of social media content.
Premiere Elements 2023 has many social-media friendly properties. For example, if you shoot video with your iPhone held horizontally, you’ll capture a horizontal 16:9 clip. However, if you want to add the footage to a vertically-oriented Instagram Story, the edges of the clip will be cropped and your key subject could be lost. Premiere Element 2023’s Auto Reframe tool can automatically crop and recompose the clip to fit the vertical shape of an Instagram Story (and it is intelligent enough to reposition people in the middle of the frame so that they are always visible).
If you’re already using Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements 2023 will slot nicely into your organising, editing and sharing workflow. Premiere Elements 2023’s accompanying Organiser uses Adobe Sensei Artificial Intelligence technology to analyse the content of your clips as well as your stills. It then adds Smart Tags that cover common subjects such as sunsets, dogs, cats and so on.
Premiere Elements 2023’s Organiser can also recognise faces in your footage, so you can find clips that feature particular people more quickly. Once you launch Premiere Elements 2023 from the Elements Organiser, you’re presented with three workspaces – Quick, Guided and Expert. The Quick workspace is a good place to trim single clips or stitch a few shots together in the timeline before sharing them as a short sequence. You can also add titles and transitions here.
Guided edits
The novice video editor might be wise to start with the Guided workspace. Here, 27 themed Guided Edits walk you through the video production process – from the basic tasks of importing, reordering and trimming clips in the timeline to adding post-production graphical elements such as captions to spruce up your social media posts. In the Guided workspace,
step-by-step text instructions are accompanied by pop-up highlights around various buttons and panels, so you can quickly learn how to find and use key editing tools.
After spending time trying the techniques in the Guided Edits, you’ll become confident enough to explore the Expert workspace. This looks similar to other non-linear video editing apps such as iMovie with a timeline along the bottom, a bin full of project assets at the left and the edited programme displayed in the viewer. Extra tools, such as filter effects, can be summoned by clicking icons on the right. Unlike the Quick workspace you can add video and audio content to multiple tracks to combine footage in more creative ways.
During our test Premiere Elements 2023 was happy to import and edit a range of different clip sizes and formats from our iPhone 14 Pro Max (including footage shot in ProRes). However, you can only adjust a Cinematic mode clip’s blur effects using iMovie and Final Cut Pro’s specialist tools.
Compared to Apple’s entry-level videoediting app iMovie, Premiere Elements 2023 boasts a more sophisticated set of postproduction tools, such as the ability to make selective adjustments to the colours and tones of a bright sky without changing a landscape’s darker exposure, for example. iMovie only lets you apply one effect filter at a time; Premiere Elements 2023 enables you to apply multiple filter layers that give you more freedom to experiment with a range of creative looks. You can adjust the properties of each filter layer to blend it with the colours and tones of the original clip.
What’s new?
The latest version of Premiere Elements boasts new Adobe Sensei-powered artistic effects that help your footage resemble the work of classic artists (such as Monet). These 24 new artistic effects are a welcome alternative to the dated collection of FX filters in previous versions. Premiere Elements 2023 also features new slideshow templates that enable you to present a mix of clips and stills in eye-catching social media presentations (though you have to access these via the Elements Organiser app’s Create menu). These slideshows feature animated graphic assets and layouts that you can experiment with to make your social media posts stand out. Premiere Elements 2023 has been optimised to take advantage of new hardware so you should experience 70% faster launch times and performance on Apple silicon Macs.
You can download a trial version of Premiere Elements 2023 from adobe.com. This gives you 30 days of full access to the app, enabling you to discover the extra tools that iMovie lacks (such as Auto Reframe).