Adobe’s Photoshop & Premiere Elements 13 Introduces Lots Of New Features & Ease-of-use

Adobe released substantial updates to its Creative Cloud platform this past summer, and with the fall now upon us, it’s the regular consumer’s turn. With Photoshop Elements 13 and Premiere Elements 13, Adobe put a lot of effort into making the tools easier to use than ever – not just for the basics, but for more advanced creations as well. Part of this results in a new guide that can help people along, or complete automation of an advanced task. Quite simply, Adobe doesn’t believe that a person should need great skill to create something cool, and I think most would agree.

Let’s dissect Photoshop Elements 13 first. A fan-favorite is being able to take a person from one photo and place them in another, and Adobe caters to that with a couple of different tools: Photomerge Compose, Refine Selection Brush, and Match Color Tone. The latter tool is really noteworthy here, as it analyses the picture you’re pasting a person (or object) into and automatically blends the lighting and shading to match.

Another feature that really stands out to me is one that allows you to create an eye-catching Facebook cover photo / profile photo combination. I’m sure we’ve all seen those profiles that have profile photos working in tandem with the cover photo, and admittedly, they’re pretty neat. Once again though, not everyone might be able to match the two photos up perfectly, so that’s one thing Photoshop Elements 13 can help with.

Other key Photoshop Elements 13 features include advanced black-and-white photos, far more options when stylizing photos, and intelligent cropping.

On the Premiere Elements 13 side of things, Adobe’s added a “Favorite” moments feature which allows you to mark the best parts of your clip, a shaky footage fixer, and many themes that will allow you to create an appropriate video that looks pretty good in no time at all.

Both Photoshop and Premiere Elements 13 by their lonesome retail for $99.99, while upgrades come in at $79.99. If you want to get the best bang-for-the-buck, you can purchase both together for $149.99, or $119.99 with an upgrade.