Adobe Premiere Elements is a reduced, simplified version of Adobe Premiere with which you can easily produce personal movies. Premiere Elements is aimed mainly at consumers that don't want to shell out big bucks for the full version of Premiere but want the basic features and slickness that you expect from Adobe's industry standard video editing suite.

More accessible than Premiere

Adobe Premiere Elements brings video editing closer to the average user who needs something a bit more powerful than Windows Movie Maker. Adobe Premiere Elements features a complete set of simple yet powerful tools that will help you extract video from several sources, combine them into a movie, add special effects and filters, and also share them with family and friends via Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo. You can also burn HD quality movies to DVD and export to presets for iPhone, iPad, Sony PSP, and more.

Adobe Premiere Elements features tons of cool features such as a Content-Aware tool to retouch and move objects seamlessly, Auto Smart Tone, and an enhanced Quick Edit mode for frames, textures, and effects. It also includes Greeting Card Printing for Japanese, US and Canadian users. Premiere elements includes Content Aware fills for refining the edges of straightened photos, and Red Eye removal.

Most recently, Adobe Premiere Elements has been improved with enhanced Mobile Video Syncing so that you can transfer space-hogging videos directly from your mobile device, into Elements for editing. Alternatively, you can sync Elements videos with your mobile, so you can access them from anywhere. Editing has generally been improved with more helpful hints on retouching videos with some new flashy titles and effects.

There are some cool narrative themes which make turning weddings and holidays into stories much slicker too. The Video Story feature does the hard work for you, taking your footage and adding themes and transitions automatically. You simply pick the moments that are most important to you and Elements does the rest. If you want to do things yourself but aren't sure how, Guided Edits take you through the editing process instead. If you've got a lot of Go-Pro footage, Elements will even automatically stabilize footage although it's only able to help fix minor shakes, not huge jolts.

Finally, Elements Live brings together the Elements community and is Adobe's center for help, tips, tutorials and advice on how to get the most out of Elements. It's also where you can enter contests with your videos and see what other people are making with Elements.

Well-organized editing interface

The interface in Adobe Premiere Elements is very similar to that in Adobe Premiere and follows a standard video editing suite layout. The application is divided into two main parts: the Organizer and the Project editor. Both work seamlessly with each other and share the same sleek, elegant dark interface. The Adobe Premiere Elements Organizer lets you browse your media (photos, audio and video), rate them and add captions to them. The Editor, on the other side, is where the creative part comes in.

The editor in Adobe Premiere Elements features the classic video editing working space, with a special area for imported media, a built-in preview window and a timeline at the bottom. Though it may seem confusing and difficult to use at first sight, a bit of effort and patience will help you master the program without much fuss. If not, there are plenty of useful Adobe tutorial videos to get you going.

Adobe Premiere Elements works with all popular media formats (including HD video) and features a bunch of useful extra features (special effects, transitions, graphics and text, menus, titles and more) with which you can easily create professional looking movies. Moreover, Adobe Premiere Elements also features all the necessary tools to share your movies, either by burning them to DVD and Blu-ray, or by uploading them straight away to Facebook and YouTube.

A great way to get started in video

Adobe Premiere Elements is the perfect way to get started with video editing and to check out some of the powerful tools included in the original Premiere suite. If you use several Adobe products already, it's a particularly good choice as it's integrated with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. If you're a pro however, you'll need find it lacks the power and speed of the full Adobe Premiere suite.