Working with video and Premiere Elements
While Photoshop Elements remains primarily involved with still image editing, Adobe Premiere Elements targets the consumer video editing market, and, increasingly so, these two applications are often sold as a bundle, simply because the line between still images and video is becoming more and more blurred.
As such, we can use the Organizer to catalog stills, HD video clips, gifs (Graphics Interchange Format files used to record short animations), audio tracks, and music, together or separately, depending on the work planned. Once organized, files can then be opened in either application – Elements or Premiere Elements – depending on how they are to be used. I edit quite a lot of video, so I find this close relationship incredibly convenient, especially where I might need to use still images in a video project, or video clips in a still image story that's, for example, to be exported to Facebook or Vimeo.
To the novice, Premiere Elements might seem unduly complex. Being a video editing application, it does deal with images and time in the one process, but this application is very much like the photo editor: you can skim through it using the automated video tools, or explore its many professional standard editing features to produce a movie with outstanding quality.
The relationship of Premiere Elements with Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe's industry-standard commercial editing suite, is similar to that of Elements and Photoshop CC. It began as a dumbed down version of the high-end commercial product, but it is now one of the best video editors on the market. Additionally, like Elements, Premiere Elements employs some incredibly powerful features that include image stabilization, an amazing instant movie feature, a wide range of professional effect looks (a look is little more than a prerecorded editing recipe designed to produce a specific color, tone or emotion to a video clip. They are great time savers), sophisticated brightness, contrast, color, and sharpness tools, and an export function that allows you to easily upload any completed video project to social media effortlessly.
If you are considering moving into video production, this is a very capable and professional tool with a great range of guided and automated functions that makes the often tedious job of editing video clips a breeze.
