Others say...

"Great for the money!"
The product works well for the budding photographer. Lets you work the photo as you wish and is forgiving for any errors. This is the product to buy if you can't afford the $700 Photoshop CS3. Get this if you want to manipulate your photos the way you want. The video editing software is just a bonus. Make sure you read all the instructions and take the vide tours to get the full benefit from these products.

"Best Deal Bundle for Two Programs"
PSE5 is the best yet with features to very simply create digital scrapbook pages! Enhancing photos is unbelievably easy with the improved selection tools methods. The framing tools are incredible for adding pizzazz and color to pictures.

Premiere Elements 3.0 is also a great improvement over using Windows Movie Maker. The many editing features for zooming, cropping, adding a framed video to another video, and slowing down speech or video, make it the all time greatest and very affordable for home users. If you want to learn video editing this is the best program to buy.


"Alot for a little "
I have always liked adobe products and both premeire elements and photoshop elements are no different.They are both very powerful progams esspecialy for the price. I do admitt that with adobe sometimes it is hard to figure out how to get it to do what you want, but there are some good books put together by different people that can help you understand the software better and figure out the effects you want to do. So budget in to get some of these books with the program. I would probably stay away from the adobe books and look for ones that are done by independent writers that are covering specific effects, corrections, etc... that you are wanting to do. Remember it is always better if your computer exceeds the minimum requirements esspecially with premeire to do any movies that are longer than just a minute or two. Have Fun!

"Photoshop Elements is Poor, Premier is Aweful."
I like the design of Photoshop Elements, but once you get more than a few thousand photos into it, it starts to slow down, eat memory and get into very long lag times. The main reason to not buy Adobe Photoshop Elements though, is that Google has a program that is very similar in design, but much better made. It's called Picasa and best of all, it's free. (Do a Google Search for "Picasa")

Premier Elements however, is aweful. I hope someone can recommend a good alternative because Premier Elements is about as good as a car that doesn't steer very well and is missing the brakes.

I forgave Adobe when it didn't run on an Athlon XP, even though this CPU is not that old... I installed it on a new Core II Duo Dell laptop to get around that.

I forgave partly when I lost hours of work to a crash that shouldn't have happened... The crash was due to an Adobe bug, but I had to take some blame for failing to save. I was surprised to find that auto save was set to the default 10 minutes though, as it sure seemed like I lost more than that.

So, I set the auto-save to 5 minutes... In fact, I started seeing the "Saving" progress bar start showing up about every 5 minutes. Then it crashed again today.. I thought I was covered, but after relaunching all my work was lost. Again, I though maybe I was doing something wrong. So I looked in the folder structure and found an "Auto-Saves" folder. It even had some very recent "project files". But guess what... I opened the most recent of them and found that none of my changes for today were there.

So aside from the unnecessarily complicated user interface, slow performance, and severe instability (all shown to be Adobe's fault by testing on multiple systems with no difference in behavior), this software will also throw out hours of your work after pretending to let you save it.

This is so bad that I am going to take another serious look at finding valid alternatives for my other Adobe software. I used to think Abode was one of the better companies. But this shows that they are willing to release dangerous junk... How can I ever trust them again?

"Tom's review of Photoshop Elements 5.0"
I love this new software. It truly is user-friendly. I had a very difficult time with the offshore Adobe customer service folks... I was on the phone with them for over an hour and they could not determine how I could access the free tutorials that are included in my package. Thankfully, a couple of days later, an email from Adobe, acknowledging my registration, included links to the tutorials. I have navigated through most of them and they are really great. The instructor sounds like an old friend looking over your shoulder. I have organized my photos, sent some along to friends and family in emails, etc. It is GREAT!! Have not had the time to get into the Premiere Elements section.