![]() ![]() Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 review: New features More pertinently, Serif's Affinity Photo - which again lacks that beginners' hand-holding but surpasses the tools on offer in Elements' Expert Mode - is less than 50 for a one-off purchase. For sure, those tools are overkill for casual photographers taking holiday snaps and pics of the kids, but if you're even faintly keen on photography, the Photography Plan is a tempting option. However, at full price Elements starts to butt up against Adobe's own Photography Plan, which includes both Lightroom and full-blown Photoshop. That’s enough to keep Elements high on our list of recommendations, but we wish there were more here to feel properly excited about.Elements' launch price of 81 is steep, but this software does tend to tumble during sale season, so bear that in mind if you're looking to purchase. If you’re already using a recent version of Photoshop Elements, however, the best arguments for upgrading are probably technical rather than creative: Elements 13 at last brings support for high-DPI displays, plus a 64-bit edition that enables ambitious edits to address more than 4GB of RAM. ![]() It’s no surprise if Adobe’s struggling to find meaningful ways to improve it. ![]() If you’re looking for the sort of hands-on editing tools that Lightroom doesn’t provide, Elements ticks many boxes, with support for multilayer compositing, raw image import, batch processing and even basic automation capabilities. That shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of Elements as a whole. The Refine Selection brush is a hit, but other than that, the new features in Elements 13 are likely to be of limited and occasional use. Last year we opined that, with Photoshop Elements 12, Adobe appeared to have “run out of ideas”, and there’s little here to dispel that impression. Perhaps that’s something to look forward to in a future release. True, the links take you off to places such as Behance and YouTube, as well as independent creative blogs, many of which host their own forums, but it would be nice to be able to bookmark eLive posts and discuss them in context with other Elements users. The experience feels rather cold, however, since there’s no interactivity whatsoever. There’s some good stuff here – early posts include a tutorial on fixing tan lines on photos and a useful guide to adjustment layers. Built right into the main interface, this serves up a series of links to online tips and projects. ![]() The Effects palette has been souped up as well in Expert Mode it’s now subdivided into styles such as Textures,Vintage and so forth, while in Quick mode you get a selection of basic operations such as Lithograph and Split Tone, each offering four variations, which you can select by simply clicking the relevant thumbnail.Īs well as new tools and wizards, Photoshop Elements introduces an integrated news channel, known as Elements Live (eLive for short). The B&W Selection tool lets you “paint” monochrome onto the chosen parts of the image, while the gimmicky “Color Pop” tool keeps one colour and desaturates the rest – an effect that gets tired fairly quickly. Under Guided Edits, a new Black and White option lets you turn colour images into high-contrast black and white, with an optional glow to add atmosphere. The remainder of the updates in Photoshop Elements 13 are even more mundane. It probably isn’t something you’ll use every day, though. When you’re happy with your work, the Upload button connects to Facebook and uploads the images directly. You can drag and scale your main image to your heart’s content, and if you wish you can “spill” your cover image into your profile image. This automatically sets up a correctly sized template for a Facebook profile, with a placeholder image and optional text overlay. This sounds like a potentially promising way to get a fresh look at your images, but in practice we found Elements’ suggestions very obvious – and you can preview only one at a time, making it hard to weigh up which you prefer.Ī feature that does work well is the new Facebook Cover wizard, tucked away under the Create menu. It’s a more visual and immediate way to work than the Refine Selection requester – and, incidentally, something that the full edition of Photoshop currently lacks.Īnother enhancement is the new Crop Suggestions feature, which analyses your image and comes up with four crop options. The best thing about it is the new Refine Selection brush, which lets you click and drag to expand, contract or smooth the edges of your selection. Beginners may find this a useful educational experience, but it’s hardly a creative revolution. ![]()
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