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Read before you download. You can use the installer files to install Photoshop Elements on your computer and then use it as full or trial version. You need your Photoshop Elements serial number to use the full version of the product. Need help finding your serial number? Sign in to My Adobe to find serial numbers for registered products.
Or, see Find the serial number for your Elements product. If you don't have the serial number, you can install the product and try it for a limited trial duration.
Make sure that your system meets the requirements for Photoshop Elements products. Having trouble? Get help from our community experts. How long does it take for download? See Estimated download times. Is my Windows bit or bit? Adobe Photoshop Elements For Windows. For macOS. It worked admirably on all but photos with backgrounds that blended in with the subject using similar colors.
The Recompose tool is one of the program's most impressive features, letting you change the aspect ratio of an image without stretching or squashing faces and the like. You can even remove selected objects and mark others for preserving.
Recompose did a good job letting me move my big head closer to a friend without distorting a test picture, though I did have to crop the photo to remove a duplicate head. You can also do standard Photoshop things, such as blur, sharpen, and add imagery. There's a good selection of clip art, too. The spot-healing brush does an excellent job at removing blemishes. I also removed a sign in the background of a photo by brushing in the texture from a forest in the image with the healing brush.
When you open a raw file from a DSLR or high-end mirrorless camera , the program starts out in a separate Adobe Camera Raw window, where you have access to color, exposure, and detail, controls. It does include Adobe's raw Profiles—such as Color, Portrait, and Vivid—along with noise reduction, but Elements has no chromatic aberration correction. There are also lens distortion corrections, but they don't use profiles to base automatic corrections on your equipment the way Lightroom and DxO PhotoLab do.
The raw importer has red-eye reduction and cropping, which seems like an unnecessary duplication of what's in the editor app. Most portrait photographers are adept at smoothing skin, and Element's Smooth Skin enhancement is designed to simplify the process. It identifies faces, overlays a circle—not an ellipse—and lets you smooth or blur the area; you can adjust the intensity of the smoothing.
It's a quick fix, but I think you're better off applying Gaussian blur to a selection or using the Spot Healing brush. The Adjust Facial Features tool is accessible from the Enhance menu. Open this, and a window pops up with all the faces circled. A right-side panel offers adjusters for Lips with Smile and related sub-choices , Eyes, Nose, and Face.
The last lets you change the forehead height, jawbone shape, and chin height. Just as with the similar tool in Photoshop , you can have a lot of fun with this. It does a great job identifying the facial features and convincingly modifying them. It's probably best to use these tools sparingly unless you want your friends looking like strangers. A face feature lets you change the tilt and direction of multiple faces in a photo. Open Closed Eyes is a cool tool that debuted in the version.
You find it under the Enhance menu in either Quick or Expert mode. When you open a photo in Open Closed Eyes, you see circles around any faces in the image, with the closed-eye faces highlighted. Then you have to choose an eye source—the fixed open eyes needn't come from the same person's face as the one with closed eyes! Believe me, if you do this with the glamor model sample eye source photos Adobe provides, you'll be in for some laughs.
When using the same person's eyes, the results are decent; the closer the shot of the source eyes to the shot you want to open eyes on, the better. I still wish Adobe included some type of refinement tools for getting the lighting and detail closer to the original's.
If nothing else, Open Closed Eyes is a fun trick. The version of Photoshop Elements introduced the Moving Photos effect, found at the bottom of the Enhance menu. Creating animated GIFs can be tricky without tools designed specifically for them. This feature creates a very specific type of animation, in which the photo subject or the whole photo zooms, pans, or rotates.
There are 11 movement options, with thumbnails that preview what they do for you. You double-click one of them to apply them to your picture, which took about 20 seconds for some photos in my tests. You can play the effect with a standard play arrow button. If you turn off the 3D Effect slider, the whole photo moves, rather than just the subject.
If you choose a photo without a clear subject, the 3D can still be cool, making it look like the camera is moving in a circle. New for the version are Moving Overlays—thinks like snowflakes, hearts, and stars to give your pictures-turned-videos some pizzazz. The menu choice is just above that for Moving Photos in the Enhance menu. It's very simple to apply the effect, and you have a choice of 27 overlay object types. You can also overlay graphics like a balloon, or flame and frames.
A helpful option is the Protect Subject check box, which automatically identifies a person or other photo subject and keeps it above the falling overlays. You can also set the opacity of the overlay with a slider.
That said, it would be nice to have more options when creating the animation, such as looping, refining the selection of what moves, or adjusting the distance of the motion. This tool makes impressive use of AI to colorize black and white pictures. After converting your image from monochrome to RGB and churning for a while, Auto mode presents you with four versions of your photo colorized. The top two choices skew towards warm tones, and the bottom two cool.
It handles various skin colors with aplomb. Colorization is especially adept at identifying water bodies and vegetation for correct color rendering. The Manual mode is completely different. It lets you select areas of an image that you want to out and out change the colors. You can turn a blue shirt red, for example. This works better with solid colors than for patterns, though it handles varying lighting on the selected areas well.
A new tab on the Effects panel brings something to Photoshop Elements that has been around for a few years in other photo applications: artistic style transfers that uses artificial intelligence to make your photo look like it was painted by Van Gogh or some other famous artist. Elements offers 26 of these style effects, but the program doesn't name artists as some other programs do.
It's a good selection; PhotoDirector starts you out with eight but then continually adds new choices for subscribers or as extra purchases for non-subscribers. I appreciate that this new Elements tools lets you adjust the strength of the filter and check a box if you want to keep the original image's colors, though doing so removes a lot of the charm of these filters.
More check boxes under the strength slider let you apply the effect only to the subject automatically determined by Sensei AI or only to the background. PhotoDirector also offers those options and adds the ability to brush the effect on and off, with brush option sliders for feathering, size, and strength. Guided Edits are one way that Elements helps novices create advanced, pro-level Photoshop Effects. They're basically wizards that use tools within the app.
If you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't need the Guided Edits to create these effects, but we don't all have MFAs. A gallery of Guided Edits shows sample images of what they do, and swiping the cursor over them reveals the before and after.
There are also tabs for different effect types, like Basics, Color, and Fun. There are now 60 Guided Edits in all, enough that it would be nice if you could search for them. You do see a before-and-after split screen view, but I wish you could step backward or forward in the process.
Below, I take you through a few of the newer and cooler Guided Edits. Perfect Pet. This new Guided Edit for the version of Photoshop Elements is a response to all those pet photos where the animal's face or part of the face is in shadow, as a natural result of the shape of animals' mugs. The Guided Edit starts you out with cropping and straightening buttons.
Then you get to remove dirt and spots with a spot removal tool. The first is an object removal which requires you to select an area with the collar, and the eye fixer removes excessive glare from those big shiny eyes. The final tool set is under fx Effects. What's more, you're not going to get great results when trying to lighten dark areas of the face when you're starting with a JPG image.
Raw camera files get you better results, so you're better off with a product designed for working with raw files like Lightroom for this type of operation. Extend Background. This tool is useful if you need an image for social media, such as an Instagram Story, Facebook page background, or Pinterest post because it gives you preset canvas sizes for those use cases. You choose which directions you want to extend the background in, and then either Autofill or Extend.
Autofill uses content-aware technology to identify and replicate the background, while Extend merely stretches the sided of the images, letting you protect a central subject from this stretching. I had an issue where I couldn't protect both of my deer with the Extend option, and Autofill required some use of the Clone Stamp button within the Guided Edit to remove an extra deer.
Perfect Landscapes. Photoshop recently got the Sensei AI-powered one-click sky replacement tool, and it makes loads of sense for Elements to have it, too. It added some brilliance to this shot of the Hudson Valley. Object Removal. This Content-Aware capability has appeared in many photo apps in the last few years. Now Elements gets a Guided Edit to simplify the process. You use one of the selection tools, and then you simply hit the Remove Object button. You can fine-tune your results with the Spot Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tool after the initial removal.
Pattern Brush. Corel PaintBrush Pro has long offered what it calls Picture Tubes—shapes like stars or hearts that you can spray onto your image. This Elements Guided Edit is pretty much the same deal.
It may sound cheesy, but it's actually fun. If you're making a gift card or poster, it could be just what the doctor ordered. You simply select a pattern from the right panel there are 15 of them, including fireworks, footprints, and leaves as well as hearts and stars and go to town on your photo. Extra niceties are that the tool can automatically protect the subject from being covered in patterns, and you can blur its edges to make it stand out.
Not everyone is a fan of memes, and I realize that this definition of the term—to mean a photo with big text—is a dumbing-down of what the word actually means. But those images with the big text can be effective. Element's Meme-Maker tool puts a colorful radiating background to your photo along with adding that big block-letter text. You can change the background and optionally apply a few different filters, including newsprint and one similar to the famous Obama Hope poster designed by Shepard Fairey using a photo by Mannie Garcia.
Multi-Photo Text. A while back the video editing programs were all adding features that could create text using your video content. The twist with this image tool is that you can use multiple photos for the letters in your text. You can either add a photo for each letter or preload the Photo Bin and have them flow automatically into the text. You can then choose a solid background color. I could see this being an effective tool for organizations' flyers and posters.
I'm far from being an artist, so if this tool can make me look like one, it has accomplished quite a feat. In fact, Painterly doesn't require any artistic ability at all. What it does is to use your existing photo for brush strokes. You get five brush styles, and, after applying one and removing unwanted areas , you can choose a background canvas texture and optionally apply a painterly filter, such as watercolor.
Again, this is a fun, easy way to create a more compelling image than your typical snapshot. Many Photoshop effects involve selecting objects precisely, and either adding or removing them to or from an image. With the Auto Selection tool, you draw a rectangle or shape over the object you want to select, and the tool determines your object's edges. The earlier Quick Selection tool has you scribble on the object you want to select. I still prefer Quick over Auto, since getting the right shape size and placement is trickier than simply scribbling over the object.
All the selection tools offer a Refine Edge option, which uses a circle with inner and outer selection circumferences. The brilliance of the tool is that it switches between adding and subtracting from your selection depending on whether you're inside or outside the original selection.
You can also hover the tool right over the edge to have Photoshop Elements refine the selection for you—that usually means adding those stray hairs to it. The tool worked impressively on a photo of my niece's Shih Tzu puppy.
The Photomerge Group Shot tool lets you get the best expression on each person from a series of group shots. You can, for example, give one person's face their eyes from another shot.
Scene Cleaner lets you remove passers-by from a landscape or famous site. Exposure, also called high dynamic range HDR , fixes by using two or more shots to combine the best version of, say, the clouds in the sky from one picture, and a forest below from a second shot.
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