Adobe Photoshop Elements Review – 2023 Update

Adobe Photoshop Elements: The Best Deals Today

$99.99

Photoshop Elements isn’t the cheapest photo-editor available for the Mac, costing $99.99/£86.56, but it’s still good value for money as it’s able to use technology from the professional version of Photoshop to provide some really powerful tools for editing your photos and adding creative effects.

It’s worth noting, though, that the Mac App Store is currently still selling the 2022 edition of Photoshop Elements, so it’s probably best to buy the latest 2023 update directly from Adobe right now (plus, if you are in the UK it’s cheeper to buy directly from Adobe U.K.Adobe also offers a bundle which includes both Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements for video-editing for $149.99/£130.36, which can save you even more money.

The key to Photoshop Elements’ success is that it manages to combine powerful editing tools with a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for amateur photographers to achieve impressive results. Adobe’s 2022 version (which arrived in 2021) introduced new artificial intelligence techniques – which Adobe refers to as Sensei – to automatically perform editing tasks that might normally require hours of work.

The app already had a range of filters that made photos look like paintings. These effects were created using oil paints and watercolours. But Sensei has introduced a new set called Artistic effects. They aim to emulate a variety popular artistic styles such as cubist or post-impressionist.

These aren’t always entirely successful – I suspect Vincent Van Gogh is spinning in his grave right now – but they’re fun to experiment with. The best part about this is the ability to apply the artistic effect to an entire photo or to just the background or subject. This allows you to highlight certain elements of the photo.

If your artistic ambitions are a little more modest, you can apply some simple animated effects – known as Overlays – such as falling snowflakes or flickering flames, to your photos and then save your work as a short video clip that you can upload to social media.

One of the things that sets Photoshop Elements apart from many of its rivals is its use of Guided Edits, which give you step-by-step help in using some of the app’s most powerful tools. One really powerful Guided Edit that was introduced in 2021’s update is the ability to alter the aspect ratio of a photo by extending the background of a photo.

If you’ve got a photo with an attractive background, such as a beach or some leafy trees then you can clone part of the background and use it to extend the background further – perhaps to turn a square photo into a wider landscape shot, or to lift a sunny blue sky higher for an upright portrait shot for social media.

You can also add cute pets to your social media accounts. Photoshop Elements offers a Guided Edit for improving photos of animals. You can adjust lighting and colour, as well as focusing on your pet (or the background) or adding a subtle vignette effect. There’s also an option to remove blemishes, such as mud or dirt, and to remove glare from the pet’s eyes.

Photoshop Elements 2023 continues to use Sensei’s artificial intelligence (which was actually launched in September 2022). In addition to applying animated overlays to a whole photo, you can also create moving elements that animate a particular section of a photo.

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You can choose to animate a part of an image (e.g. a waterfall or the flowing mane on a horse) to make it more dynamic and attractive.

The program’s selection tools can help you to select either the background of an image, or elements in the foreground, and you can simply draw a line to indicate the direction of movement (so the waterfall flows down, rather than upwards).

You can adjust settings like the speed of movement. Before exporting the animated file, you can preview the effect and save it as an MP4 clip or as animated-GIF.

Guided Edits is a section that allows you to add overlays and new background images to your photos. It also includes tools that can enhance the sky appearance. And, with so many Guided Edits now available, we were pleased to see that there’s a new Search tool that helps you to quickly locate the Guided Edits you need by searching for keywords such as crop or sky.

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Connected Experience features include new apps for iOS and Android and a web application that can be used on any browser on any device.

Mobile apps allow you to upload photos or videos from your phone or tablet. You also get 2GB free online storage. These files can be quickly imported into Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements to get started with your editing.

The web app is similar and includes basic tools that allow you to create slideshows and collages quickly without having to use the full desktop apps. The web app is currently in beta and will be available for public use. A beta version of the iOS app is expected to follow towards the end.

Photoshop Elements 2023 adds support for Apple Silicon. Adobe claims that Photoshop Elements 2023 will run 45 percent faster on Macs with M1 or M2 processors.

There’s also a 30-day free trial available too, so you can check out the latest version before deciding if you want to buy it, or upgrade from last year’s version.

Verdict

In recent years, some of Photoshop Elements’ annual upgrades were starting to look as though they were running out of ideas, but the AI features have given the app a new lease of life, and confirmed Photoshop Elements as one of the best photo-editors for amateur photographers.

Check out our list of top-rated Mac Photo Editors, both free and paid. Here are the top free and inexpensive image editors. Also, we have a list of the top alternatives to photoshop in our The best professional photo editors round up.