Adobe Premiere Elements 10 review

Premiere Elements has finally caught up with Movie Studio Platinum for colour correction. An AutoTone & Vibrance effect automatically turns clips into sumptuous explosions of colour, and alternatively provides various manual controls for tweaking the brightness and contrast with a high level of precision.

The Three Way Color Corrector effect uses a trio of colour wheels to apply tints to highlights, midtones and shadows. It includes separate saturation controls for each band, and even lets the user adjust the threshold between the bands. This is a powerful tool that’s based on colour-correction techniques used by professionals.

It’s not particularly welcoming, though, not least because its controls don’t fit in the effects properties panel; regular scrolling is required and there’s no way to get an at-a-glance overview of settings.

There’s still no curve-based colour correction, but the above two effects, used in conjunction with the Gamma Correction, Shadow/Highlight, Auto Color, Auto Contrast and Auto Levels effects, are capable of superb results. Having to combine multiple effects can be cumbersome, but the ability to reorder them can be useful.

The remaining new features aren’t so enticing. It can generate animated slideshows, automatically zooming and panning from face to face. However, these animations are clunky and unattractive compared to the elegant, sweeping animations that Premiere Elements is already capable of with its advanced Bézier keyframe tools.

It can now upload videos directly to Facebook, but as with many of its export templates, the frame rate is fixed at 30fps rather than adapting to the project settings, needlessly inserting repeated frames from 25fps footage and compromising motion smoothness. Once again, this is basic stuff that we expect Adobe to get right.

Disc authoring is available at 25fps (PAL) or 30fps (NTSC) frame rates, but the lack of 24fps Blu-ray authoring won’t please Nikon DSLR owners, and disc structure options are extremely basic. At least there’s finally an option to burn HD video onto DVD media in the widely compatible AVCHD disc format.

There’s a lot in Premiere Elements that other consumer editing packages can’t begin to compete with – its Bézier keyframe tools are a particular highlight. However, there are too many rough edges, and in trying to please both casual and experienced users, it fails to do either.

There are some worthwhile improvements here, but the £69 inc VAT upgrade price is so high that we recommend existing users seriously consider jumping ship.