Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

I hack on Adobe now and then for their unstable software, but I've got to hand it to them: this is some damn impressive software coding! This feature looks extremely impressive - I wonder how long it will take to filter down to their Elements version of Photoshop?

"Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 & Adobe Premiere Elements 8 software gives you power and ease of use so you can do some amazing storytelling with photos and videos. Create extraordinary photos and incredible movies, and use them together in cinematic slide shows and more."

Another year, another version of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. It still feels like v7 of both products are "new" to me, but Adobe has locked into a yearly release cycle for both these products so I shouldn't be surprised. I'm a big fan of Photoshop Elements and use it daily. I happen to believe that a large number of people using Photoshop really don't need it, and encourage people to give Photoshop Elements a try whenever I can - it's a very capable program that can do everything most people need to do. There's certainly a place for the full-fledged version of Photoshop in the marketplace, but I think people buy into the "I need to have Photoshop, nothing else will do" a little too often.

Premiere Elements? I have mixed feelings about this program. On the one hand, it's delightfully easy to use - everything is fairly intuitive about it, and after having used it for a few years I can work really quickly with it. The down-side is that, in general, it's not a very stable program. Prior to v7, I'd describe it as "crash happy". Things got much better with v7, but I still had trouble with it on a fairly frequent basis. What boggles the mind is that Adobe seems to be the only company in the world that never releases software patches or updates for their Elements line - they don't fix bugs, or address new codecs, they just release a new version and presumably fix the problem in the new version. As an example, Premiere Elements 7 chokes on the AVCHD Lite files from my Panasonic DMC-ZS3 camera. Is there going to be an update to fix this problem? Nope. Will it work properly in v8? Yes, it's likely that it will. So I'll very likely give v8 a try and hope that things get better with it again...

"Adobe® Photoshop.com Mobile is the easiest way to upload, view, and share your photos online from your phone. All you need is a supported Windows Mobile phone and your Photoshop.com account ID. Photoshop.com Mobile beta will be available as a free download in September."

The beta of Photoshop.com Mobile - announced a few weeks ago - is now live, but only for US customers. Only a small handful of Windows Mobile devices are currently supported, but that list is set to grow, and you may still get lucky with your unsupported device, anyway. Anyone plan on using this service?

"Adobe® Photoshop.com Mobile is the easiest way to upload, view, and share your photos online from your phone. All you need is a supported Windows Mobile phone and your Photoshop.com account ID. Photoshop.com Mobile beta will be available as a free download in September."

Adobe claims that Photoshop.com Mobile will only support the MOTO Q, Blackjack, and Treo 700/750 series, although we're willing to bet most other Windows Mobile devices will handle it just fine as long as Flash is installed. At any rate, we'll let you know the moment it's available.