Adobe Photoshop Elements

 

When I purchased Adobe Premiere Elements, discussed in an earlier post, Photoshop Elements came bundled with it.  True, I could have purchased Premiere Elements separately, but I decided it would be best to take the entire bundle at a sale price of $89.99 for a simple reason:  Adobe officially ended support for CS6 a number of years ago, which means that if the app should ever become inoperable due to changes in the Windows operating system, Adobe will do nothing to fix the problem. Fair enough since CS6 is hardly a new app (Adobe actually stopped selling it in June, 2014) but users would then have to either subscribe to Photoshop CC or else switch to an entirely different photo editing app.  I would opt for the second alternative myself.  I already own and use several other apps, including GIMP (which is essentially a reverse engineered shareware version of CS6 even if the interface isn't nearly as sexy), Affinity, Corel Paintshop Pro, and the new Luminar Neo.  The great problem with these, however, is that they generally do not support the third-party Photoshop plug-ins I use extensively in my editing.  Photoshop Elements, on the other hand, does support every one of the many plug-ins I have on my computer.  That feature alone makes it worth its purchase price.

Looking beyond that, I was surprised to find that Elements is, considering its low price, a fairly sophisticated editing app when used in Expert mode.  There are enough Photoshop tools here that, if it weren't for the clunky Curves tool, I could probably use it in a pinch to do (very) basic editing on many of my photos.  And there are some interesting features that have been added to the 2022 version, such as the ability to easily extend backgrounds that's intended to be used in conjunction with the content-aware fill tool and the ability to warp shapes when pasting one photo inside another.  In contrast, the one-click effects that are intended to "instantly turn photos into art" are too cartoonish to be usable by anyone but schoolchildren.  The same can also be said of the feature that allows animation effects, such as falling snowflakes, to be added to still photos.

As long as CS6 continues to work properly, I have no intention of using Elements.  I'll only keep it on my computer against the day CS6 no longer works properly and I'm in need of another vehicle with which to apply third-party plugins to my photos.

I might as well note in passing that when one clicks on the desktop icons for either Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements, instead of being taken directly to the apps one is instead directed to a welcome screen where one can choose between the two apps and the Organizer.  While the Organizer allows one to rate and tag photos and videos it does not open them in the appropriate app when double clicking on them.  At present, I have no more real use for this feature than for the catalog function in Lightroom and will continue using the old version of Bridge that came bundled with Photoshop CS6.