New for the 2019 version of Elements is the home screen, from which you can launch any of the three Elements apps—Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements, or Organizer—and also see help links.

Any photographer struggling with the heavy-duty interfaces of Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop, or who simply doesn’t want so sign up for a subscription, is a good candidate for their lighterweight sibling, Photoshop Elements. The same goes for videographers unwilling to sign up for an expensive Creative Cloud plan and might be well-served by Premiere Elements.

(If you can't open the.pkg because of your security preferences, you can change them or make a one-time exception. (You may need to in order to open this too.) • Step 2: Play Some Audio & Cast It After launching the Soundcast app, you should now see the icon in your. Chromecast app for mac. Download the.zip file, open it, and drag the Soundcast app to your Applications folder. Download the.zip file below, open the.dmg file, then install the.pkg file. ) • The second is the actual app we'll be using,.

The good news is the Elements product line becomes more powerful each year. Today, Adobe has unveiled version 18 of the applications, skipping 16 and 17 to line up with the calendar with a new name of 2018, and they’re both chock full of new features. I’ve been working with early versions for a few weeks now, and continue to be impressed by the steady progress Adobe has made. Elements 2018 Is Faster and Smarter Adobe is always working on performance, and says Elements 2018 offers more of it.

In testing, edit operations certainly seemed responsive, and some Organizer operations also seemed quicker. But with huge catalogs, things can still be sluggish. Just as, Adobe is working hard to add artificial intelligence to Elements. It had already added some great facial recognition technology, but version 2018 builds in some exciting new AI-enabled features including Auto Curation, the ability to open closed eyes, and automated object selection. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights. Auto Curation May Be the Biggest Time Saver of 2017–If You Trust It Without a doubt, the headline feature of Elements 2018 is Auto Curate.

It attacks the problem every photographer has of choosing the best few images from a large group. No longer will it be okay to post 300 photos from your family trip to a social media site because you’re too busy or lazy to pick out the best 20. Elements can do it for you.

Auto Curate lets Photoshop pick what it thinks are the top photos from any folder or collection and gives you a head start on sharing or creating a slideshow I tried it on collections of image from a number of my recent trips, and it did quite a good job of at least picking out a variety of images that had good technical elements and conveyed different parts of the experience. However, it isn’t a magic bullet. In many cases it picked several nearly identical images, so at a minimum you’ll need to go through the results to weed out excess. Conversely, it often left out some of the key scenes or family portraits.

So for now I’ll give it a solid “B” as a tool that should help you save some time, but still requires manual intervention. This new intelligence doesn’t come quickly. Auto-Curation can take a long time if you bulk import a lot of files, and facial recognition can take even longer. While they both run in the background, you aren’t able to use Auto-Curate until it has processed your entire catalog of images, so give it plenty of time. Saving the Almost-Perfect Photo One of the more unique features in Elements 2018 is an extension of its current capability to modify facial features. Last year, Adobe added the ability to reshape smiles and other parts of the face, but with Version 2018 they have added the option to “open someone’s eyes.” No, it isn’t magic: You need to have a photo of them with their eyes open. From working with the new feature, it’s also clear that for best results, both images need to be shot under similar lighting, and in similar poses.

Other new Guided Edits let you Swap Backgrounds in your images, create Double Exposures, add Artistic Overlays, and turn them into Watercolor-like versions. Premiere Elements adds Candid Moment and Smart Trim While the updates to Premiere Elements–the video editing portion of the Elements suite–aren’t as impressive, they’re definitely nice to have. The first is Candid Moments, which selects a number of frames from your video and creates still photographs from them. When it works, it can help you decide whether to capture an event with video or photos. Of course, you’re not going to be getting the same resolution you would with stills. But if you simply want to grab a few highlights to share online, it provides a quick way to do that. Smart Trim helps with video somewhat the same way Auto Curation does with still images.