Adobe has announced the release of Photoshop Elements 15, Premiere Elements 15, and Elements Organizer 15. The update brings with it a slew of new features including a drastically improved interface and most intriguingly, tools that can change the very expression of subjects.
Here’s a breakdown of the highlights of what this new edition set brings to the table for photo editors.
Guided Edits
To newbies, jumping into a professional image editor can be a jarring and befuddling inconvenience. In order to make for a smoother experience for editing padawans and to provide a tutorial of sorts, Adobe Elements now includes a ‘guided edit’ system. Using a system of updated tools, prompts and dropdown menus, the program suggests what actions you might like to take. With the degrees of difficulty graded between quick, guided, and expert, there are 45 guided edits included in this release. Five are new, including Photo Text, Painterly, Speed Pan and Frame Creator.
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Face Tools
This new edition of Elements comes with some impressive identification tech and that includes what is likely to be considered the trademark upgrade of this version – facial recognition. Photoshop Elements 15 comes with a specialised facial editor that can automatically recognise physical features and allow for their manipulation.
The system will split up each of these recognised facial elements (noses, mouths, eyes, ears) into categories. Just like the character creator in any modern videogame, those categories will then have sliders available to change the characteristics of those parts. For example, they can make a mouth wider or thinner, larger or smaller, and higher or lower on a given face. The tool can even potentially be used to give virtual facelifts to subjects by manipulating the cheeks.
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Beware though, as things can get very weird looking very fast. Unlike many of those character creators that have a complete net of the face that can gauge the relationship between the face’s parts, this tool is guessing and the parts aren’t actually tied together. This means that while a slight alteration could improve a photo, a major change without updating the rest of the face will have the subject looking utterly bizarre. So even though it is possible to use this tool to “turn frowns upside down” as Adobe advertises, doing so may produce unnerving results.
Adobe Elements Organizer
When working on a large project, finding individual photos if you’ve got an archive of hundreds of photos to work from can be agonizing. However, drawing on the similar AI tech to the facial editor, Adobe Elements’ Organizer has object recognition. In addition to recognising specific items within photos, the software will Smart Tag them. This means that if you search in your organiser for “car”, it should return you all the car related pictures you have, without needing to have done any captioning or filling out of metadata. This even works with combinations of various objects.
The photo organizer also now works with with touchscreens on laptops and desktops, providing that easy browsing only the mobile device market had before with Elements.
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These new features don’t amount to a huge set of improvements for the Elements product range but they are still almost guaranteed to be much appreciated by the users prefer the slimmer faster versions of Adobe’s wares to the fully-featured versions. Adobe Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements and Organizer Elements can each be bought separately for US$99 or as a package for US$149 . For existing users the price is slashed down with individual upgrades costing US$79 per program and a US$119 full set upgrade.
. digitalrev.com2016-10-7 03:00
