Adobe has released the latest version of Photoshop and Premiere Elements, saying that this year’s releases is focusing on enhancing the photo and video editing experience for “memory keepers with hassle free organization,” automated editing, and new guide features that help you through the editing process and how to use the programs.

New with Premiere Elements 2018 is a feature Adobe is calling Smart Trim. Smart Trim is an automatic trim system that Adobe says will trim bad scenes and keep the good ones based on the style that you want for your video. “Smart Trim finds and brings together the best scenes based on the style of your video, and you can even customize that automation,” says Adobe. Also new with Premiere is a feature that could prove very useful to hybrid videographers-photographers, which is a very common combination nowadays. With Adobe Premiere Elements 2018, Adobe says that users can automatically and easily extract photos from raw video footage. It seems like a feature that could make videographer-photographers’ lives simpler when capturing things like live events or weddings since it means you'll only having to focus on shooting good video instead of having to switch between shooting video and photos.

Photoshop Elements 2018 seems to offer a few interesting new features, like automatic selection and a feature that fixes closed eyes in pictures. With automatic selection, Adobe says that they’ve simplified the selecting process that can often be a big pain. Now, the selecting process is reported to be as simple as “click, drag and it’s done.” The feature seems like it does make a pretty accurate and easy selection over more defined surfaces, but as you can see in the picture below, the frizzy hair on top of the boy’s head wasn’t selected so it was cropped outa bit awkwardly. Hair and things like it are hard to select in Photoshop, so when using automatic selection, you may need to use a mask after if you want to capture those kinds of things.

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Photoshop Elements is now said to be able to fix closed eyes in photos by automatically copying the subjects eyes when they are open in another photo and blending them in to create the photo you desire. It seems like an interesting feature, but you would need to have similar photos with the same lighting and angle for this to work.

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Elements Organizer also has gotten a new 2018 version along with Photoshop and Premiere. Adobe says that it now can automatically pick out the “best” photos in a batch; it decides which are the best based on “quality, faces, subjects” and other factors. Elements Organizer 2018 is supposed to help guide you through edits as well. For instance, it gives you step-by-step help making a clip of your video run forward and backward repetitively. It also helps you add a freeze frame to a section of your video and eliminate the wide angle fisheye effect that you can get with action cams.

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Photoshop Elements 2018 and Premiere Elements 2018 are being sold individually for $79, but if you want both you can get them together for $119.

Go to adobe.com to download the new versions of Photoshop and Premiere and to learn more about them.