Adobe considers the audience for its consumer-targeted video editing software to be what it calls "memory keepers"—people who document special family moments. But really, anyone who wants to create compelling videos without tackling a complex professional application like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro can take advantage of Premiere Elements. In addition to being easy to use, it lets you go fairly deep with multitrack and keyframe-based editing. Or you can ignore all that and use its automated tools. The program trails Editors' Choice winner CyberLink PowerDirector in the breadth of effects, rendering speed, and formats it supports, however.
How Much Does Premiere Elements Cost?
You can get Premiere Elements in a bundle with Photoshop Elements for $149.99 or as a standalone app for $99.99. Those prices are one-time fees—but there's a catch: The license is good only for a period of three years. Before this version, it gave you a perpetual license. Note that Premiere Elements is not a part of Adobe Creative Cloud service. If you're upgrading from a previous version, the prices for the bundle and single app drop to $119.99 and $79.99, respectively. A free trial lets you use the program fully for 30 days, but any videos you make get a watermark.
For comparison, CyberLink PowerDirector is available as a $74.99-per-year subscription or a one-time price of $139.99 for the Ultimate version, which lacks stock and AI features. The $134.99-per-year PowerDirector 365 subscription gets you access to millions of Shutterstock and Getty stock media. Corel VideoStudio costs $99.99, with no subscription option. Pinnacle Studio goes for $129.99, and it's powerful and consumer-friendly, too.
Can Your System Run Premiere Elements?
The software runs on Microsoft Windows 10 (version 22H2, 64-bit) or 11 (version 23H2 or later) and macOS 13 or later. Make sure you have a fast internet connection and a capacious hard drive (preferably an SSD) before installing the program. You need a reasonably powerful machine with an Intel 6th Generation or newer processor or the AMD equivalent with SSE4.1 and AVX support, at least 8GB of RAM (16GB for HD media or higher), 10GB of hard drive space, and 4GB VRAM. The app requires at least a 1,280-by-800 resolution monitor. Additionally, Windows users need SSE2 support on the CPU and a DirectX 12-compatible graphics card.
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What's New in Premiere Elements?
The 2025 version of Elements brings the interface much closer to Adobe's professional video editing software—which could be a pro or a con, depending on your point of view. It also introduces a few new options and features. Here's the full rundown:
Simplified, subtly updated user interface and timeline, with both video and tracks grouped together
New title effects that take advantage of Motion Graphics templates from After Effects
Color Correction Tools, including White Balance
Color Grading, including LUT support
Stock Title Templates
Updated web and mobile companion apps.
Apple M3 chip support
The previous update added arguably more important new capabilities, including Automatic Highlight Reels that use AI to turn your video clips and automatically output an edited movie. Other recent features include Color Match, a dark mode, Auto Reframe (which crops your media to fit an aspect ratio it wasn’t originally shot in), mask selection with motion tracking, Smart Trim (which cuts out boring video sections), animated GIF creation, and sky replacement.
Organizing Media in Premiere Elements
When you open Premiere Elements, you first see the Home screen, a separate window from which you can launch any of the three Elements apps—Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements, or Organizer. The Home screen also shows help links, Auto Creations, tips on various features, and recent projects.
The separate Organizer app is where you import, rate, keyword tag, search, and share media online. The Organizer offers a Dark Mode (the main editor app has this, too) as well as monochromatic and modern buttons. A cloud icon at the top right shows the syncing status, the remaining storage, and a Sync button. The globe icon at the bottom right opens the web version of Elements in your default browser.
Mode options appear right at the top of the Organizer, including Media, People, Places, and Events. The last three give you helpful ways of viewing your media, and I'm happy to report that the 2025 version adds clear buttons for filtering by content type—photos, videos, audio, and projects. The Organizer is somewhat skewed toward photos. Its Instant Fix button only works for photos, as does the Places view. It has, however, become more intuitive to use over the years.
The Organizer shows off its chops when you tap the Search magnifying glass icon on the top window border. A set of buttons appears along the left edge, letting you filter your search by People, Places, Dates, Keywords, Albums, Folders, Media Types, and Star Ratings, and automatic AI-generated Smart Tags. You can combine search types, looking up, for example, pictures of Joe Smith taken in New York City in September. Automatic object tagging and people tagging work with video content as well. The program did find and identify objects in my videos (even faces), but the People view didn't offer any face tagging from my video clips, which were rife with smiles.
One way in which Premiere Elements is falling behind some of the competition, like CyberLink PowerDirector and Wondershare Filmora, is its lack of stock media. The 2025 version does add stock title templates but not video clips or photos. This omission is especially baffling because Adobe has its own repository, Adobe Stock. It's also something that seems eminently desirable for hobbyists and YouTubers. I also wish it was easier to restrict the gallery to a certain media type—video, photo, or audio. You have to go through the menu to get to this setting, while other apps have simple buttons. Even the smaller version of Organizer that lives within the editing interface has them.
Editing Video in Premiere Elements
The video editing interface has three mode tabs: Quick, Guided, and Expert. The 2025 version makes subtle changes to the interface, bringing it close to that of Adobe Premiere Pro. The Home and Organizer buttons are now on the left side rail, while an X closes the right-side editing panel rather than an arrow. The initial editor interface has a similar look; gone are the large buttons for trimming and combining clips.
In Advanced mode, you get the standard timeline across the bottom, while preview and content panels share the top half of the window. In this mode, there are more tools to the left of the timeline area.
Resizing the timeline now involves more complicated sliders with controls on each end, just like in Premiere Pro.
You can also choose File > New > Project from the menus, where you see a choice of aspect ratios for the movie. You can't change the frame rate or size during editing, but you can now do so during export. And clips of different resolutions no longer resize to fit your chosen canvas size. However, as in Premiere Pro, you can right-click on the clip's timeline entry and choose Scale to Frame Size to accomplish that.
Touch screens on PCs, like those on Surface and convertible PCs, get excellent support in the recent versions of Windows. I'm happy to see Adobe also putting in the effort to support this input option, at least in the Organizer and in Quick mode. That said, the support could be better. You can scrub through video and add and split clips, but some controls are still on the small side for pudgy finger manipulation. There's no touch-specific interface option like that in Photoshop and Lightroom.
You can capture and import video and photos from within the editor as well as from the Organizer. The Editor's Add Media button offers choices to get media from the Organizer (which opens a preview panel), from files and folders, or directly from cameras and devices. Elements supports 4K content, so owners of a GoPro Hero or any recent flagship smartphone can take advantage of their cameras' top resolutions. In testing, even 5K footage from a recent GoPro doesn't present a problem.
The program still doesn't support 3D or 360-degree VR clips. You might consider those niche usage cases, but competitors such as Magix Movie Edit Pro, Vegas Movie Studio, and PowerDirector (as well as Final Cut Pro on the Mac) have long supported these formats, and it's not that unusual to see 360-degree video in social media posts.
Premiere Elements also lacks screen-cam recording, which lets you create videos of desktop activity on your computer screen. This is available in Corel VideoStudio Pro and PowerDirector. And there's no multicam editing feature, which lets you sync the same scene shot with different cameras at different angles. Both PowerDirector and Magix Movie Edit Pro offer that. Mac users get strong multicam editing features in Final Cut Pro, our Editors' Choice pick for video editing on Macs.
The Project Assets panel helpfully drops down to show thumbnails of all your clips, audio, and image files. It resembles the way pro software uses bins to keep track of assets. There's also a helpful History window, which lets you see what your project looked like at any point during your previous edits. You can also search within the transition and effect selection boxes, which I find helpful.
One thing I miss on the Expert mode's timeline is the ability to quickly solo a track, hiding all the others. That said, you can hide either a video or audio track by clicking on the film or speaker icons at the head of the timeline. Also missing is the ability to zoom the timeline in and out with the mouse wheel, but a Fit to Visible Timeline button and the zoom slider work well enough. You can't pop out panels into separate windows, but you can use a dual-monitor setup. A final interface annoyance is that Premiere Elements' windows don't follow Windows standards, so you can't, for example, drag a window to the side to take up half the screen, use Snap Layouts, or shake the title bar to minimize other programs.
Quick Mode Edits Your Clips for You
Quick mode offers a clear, simple way to join video clips, as well as add titles, transitions, image corrections, soundtracks, and effects—all without requiring you to work in a labyrinth of tracks and controls. Instead of a storyboard view, it uses a simplified timeline view Adobe calls a Sceneline. This offers two AV tracks and one Audio track. You see only four tools to the left of the timeline—Selection, Rate Stretch (for speed altering), Scissor, and Text. Auto Reframe and Freeze Frame are within easy access from each clip thumbnail. You can add music, with options to fade in and out from the tool above. Right-clicking on the Sceneline offers choices to Separate Audio, Collapse Audio, Duplicate, and Clear.
Highlight Reel
This tool is accessible from the Create drop-down menu at the top left corner of the interface in either Quick or Advanced mode. It's geared toward the short vertical formats that have appeared in all social video-sharing services. It opens a dedicated interface with a panel for your Organizer content on the left. On the right, you get choices for five social video service formats. (Interestingly, TikTok is not among them.) You drag content into the Selected media panel, choose a format, and optionally select background music, which can be either canned tracks from Adobe or your own music files. Then, you click the blue Create button at the top right. It detects scenes with people and those in good focus.
On my first try, it filled in the empty areas of a vertical image with blurred, zoomed material from the clips in order to accommodate the aspect ratio change. If you're happy with the result, you can choose Render; if not, there's a Change the Look button, which merely changes the color tones for my test project. You can also further edit the result for more customization in the standard timeline editor view or choose Export to Social. Note that this doesn't connect directly with Instagram or Pinterest but simply saves the video file in a compatible format. When testing the 2025 version of the software, I often got an error message that said the "input media is not long enough," even though I'd added 15 minutes of video clips. I've contacted Adobe about this and will update this review when I get further information.
Advanced Correction Tools in Premiere Elements
In the section below, I outline some of Premiere Elements' more powerful tools for correcting your video productions' color, lighting, framing, and more, whether for the widescreen or the small screen.
Auto Reframe
Auto Reframe, as it sounds, fits a clip to a different aspect ratio than it was shot in. The tool, accessible from a button above the timeline or in the right-side F/X panel's Transform group, uses Adobe Sensei AI to determine what's important in the frame and crops to show only that. In my testing, it worked almost instantly, and unlike my attempts with early similar tools in Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut, it kept the subject centered, as you can see in the sample here. I've shown the clip in its original aspect ratio in the source viewer on the left. If you're not happy with the crop, you can adjust its offset, position, scale, and rotation from the Applied F/X panel.
Smart Trim
Premiere Elements' Smart Trim identifies poor-quality sections of your media and can delete them all at once. Style choices—People, Action, and Mix—affect what sections of the clips it retains. It automatically selected Action for my bike stunt test video, and trim suggestions appeared instantly. You can preview the suggested trims. The app did a good job of selecting the most active scenes, though one short section was dull, and some farther-away skateboard tricks weren't included. It also removed out-of-focus and shaky sections, which I appreciated. Handles let you easily extend the selections, and you can simply use the Delete key to remove one. If you have long footage of limited interest, Smart Trim is helpful.
Video Stabilization
Premiere Elements lets you apply video stabilization from either Quick or Expert mode by choosing Shake Stabilizer from the Adjust panel. There are two methods of stabilization accessible from buttons—Quick and Detailed. Quick isn't that quick, however. My 1:35-minute clip took about 10 minutes to stabilize in Quick mode. At least Premiere Elements shows you the progress—minutes left, percent done, and current frame.
After that, a banner message says, "To avoid extreme cropping, set Framing to Stabilize Only or adjust other parameters." In my testing, I had to go into the Detailed panel and choose Advanced, where I had a lot of choices, such as smoothness, crop percent, and edge feather. It's a powerful tool, but you need patience for long clips. Even setting Smoothness to 100% doesn't always fix large bumps. One cool choice is Synthesize Edges, which prevents cropping.
Dehaze, a feature that has made its way into a lot of photo editing software, is available from Premiere Elements' Effects panel's Advanced Adjustment section. It did a fine job of adding contrast and saturation to my test landscape footage, as you can see in the screenshot below.
Color Match
The Color Match tool isn't meant to produce consistent natural colors between clips to account for different cameras and lighting but instead serves as a dazzling effect. Note how the river below takes on the exact colors of the football game for a hardly realistic image. Furthermore, the trees take on the colors of the players' uniforms, the water is the color of the grass, and the clouds match the lamps on the building near the playing field.
Reduce Grainy Noise
The Reduce Noise tool is another example of bringing something from photo editing to video editing. Amusingly, the program has long had a tool for adding noise as an effect, but not a correction. You simply drag the Reduce Noise icon from the F/X panel on the right, and then the adjustments for the tool open. You get only three settings for the amount of noise reduction: Default, Medium, and High. It's not going to turn a horribly noisy clip into a great one, but it does smooth out overly grainy shots, and you can apply the correction to a mask selection (see below).
Color Correction and Grading
Another powerful tool in Premiere Elements 2025 is the new Color Correction and Grading panel, accessible from the Tools button on the right toolbar. This comprises both standard correction tools like white balance and exposure, LUTs, a Creative section, and Curves. Perhaps the most interesting section is Creative, which offers color wheels for highlights and shadows, Faded Film, and Vibrance settings. The Basic section includes an Auto button to apply the program's best guess as to the correct color balance. You get both input LUTs for matching camera models' inputs (some of the units are unlikely for people using consumer software like Elements, such as ARRI Log C4). There are also a lot of fun LUTs to apply in the Creative section, such as Candlelight, Futuristic Bleak, and Sunset Silhouette.
Guided Edits in Premiere Elements
Premiere Elements' Guided Edit tools are tutorials that hold your hand through the steps of creating effects that are more complex than just pressing a button or adjusting a slider. Simply tap the Guided Edits mode-switcher button to see them all. Adobe updates the Guided Edit interface for the 2025 version, putting them into a left-side panel. I found the previous design more helpful since it let me more easily see the full set of edits in basic categories. You now have to download each edit before you can use it, which is good for lowering the initial program download size. Another step backward, however, is that the new Guided Edits no longer overlay the part of the interface where you need to do something; instead, they're just short, small videos that show you the process. Before, you couldn't advance to the next step without successfully completing the previous one, but now you could just press the forward arrow even if you didn't complete the step. Below is an example of this newfangled Guided Edit style for creating slow-motion or fast-motion effects.
A bunch of Guided edits have been removed, such as Animated Sky and Fill Frame. You see only three Fun Edits sections now, too. There are still some good ones available, however, like Animated Overlays and Luma Fade.
Advanced Video Effects in Premiere Elements
The effects I've come to expect in a consumer video editor are mostly present. There's a wealth of transitions, picture-in-picture, chroma-keying, scaling, opacity, and even keyframe-timed effects. You can still use the Video Collage feature (accessible from the Create button) to easily drag clips into a selection of multi-shot templates, or you can just drop a clip above another on the timeline and resize it for PiP. The Graphics tool can insert animated and still objects such as flying birds (and other animals), stars, snow, and speech bubbles. Some advanced effects are GPU-enabled, meaning you don't have to wait for them to render on the timeline to view them immediately.
For the 2025 update, Adobe removes several tools, including the interesting Luma Key, Spherize, and Line Drawing effects as well as the previously included powerful NewBlue effects. For those and other cool tools, look to another app such as PowerDirector.
Selections in Effects
Under the effects entry, you see a Draw button with options for using a Pen, Circle, or Rectangle. The Pen is what lets you create masks for irregularly shaped objects such as human beings, so it's probably the most useful. You can tune your selection with feather, opacity, and expansion sliders. The best part is that you can use motion tracking on them without opening a separate tool. The Pen selection is touchy compared with selecting in Photoshop. The cursor often unexpectedly and undesirably changed into a rotation cursor before I'd finished the selection in testing. You can make multiple selections, as well as invert the selection. The latter is useful for when you want to apply the effect to everything outside your selection. If you want to apply multiple effects, a Copy selection option eases that operation.
The tracking worked as well as standard motion tracking tools. For my test, the cyclist subject disappeared behind a truck momentarily. But after a few tries, I was able to move the mask back over her and retrack for some semblance of continuity. Note that selection appears only with actual effects, not with corrections such as lighting or color.
Titles and Text in Premiere Elements
The app now includes 100 preset Motion Titles from Adobe Stock. You can search for one that fits your needs, but the program no longer groups them into categories like Contemporary, Formal, Geometric, Decorative, Typography, and Fun. They look professional, and most offer opening, ending, and lower-third options. You also get good customizability with fonts and background images (including transparent through to your video). You can even change the animation type—wipe to center, fly in with twist, and so on. Working with the new titles is complex, however. You don't get much help, and there's no easy way to get the cool transparent titles the way you can in Pinnacle Studio.
Audio Editing in Premiere Elements
Audio tools are completely revamped for the 2025 version of Premiere Elements. From the Effect menu (the same one from which you get video effects), you can choose Audio Effects, which include DeEsser, Delay, Lowpass, and more. The DeHummer tool did a nice job removing ambient traffic noise in an outdoor clip, and it lets you adjust the bypass frequency (it's at 60Hz for electric hum by default). You no longer get powerful NewBlue audio effects, such as Audio Polish, but there is a Studio Reverb effect that lets you change the room size. You can adjust a clip volume by dragging the line in the timeline's waveform up and down as you can in many video editors, but the Audio mixer is now a separate popup window you open from the Tools menu.
Premiere Elements' Music Remix tool can change the length of soundtracks to match your video. It works with any MP3 file, Music Score, or Audio Track and is the default for sound you place in the Music track on the timeline. In several tests, it worked acceptably, though there was often extra silence at the end.
Soundtracks and Sound Effects
Elements can pump up your digital movie's aural impact with scores and sound effects. You get two options: Music Scores—actual full songs, and Audio Tracks—background music clips. Both include musical backgrounds to fit different moods. Scores and Tracks are in categories such as Ambient and Urban, as well as genres like Country and Rock-Pop. For Music Scores, you can check the fit-to-entire-video box and whether to delete existing clip sounds after dragging them onto the timeline. For the Audio Tracks, you have to use the Remix trimmer.
You also get a full selection of sound effects from Air Conditioner to Wire Bunched Hitting Hollow Wood. A Foley group of sounds, such as Bottle Cap Screwing on and Cell Phone Battery Inserting, can give your video a true Hollywood touch of faux reality. I easily timed an explosion sound effect with a bike jump in my test movie.
Premiere Elements Mobile and Web Access
With the 2023 release of Premiere Elements, Adobe inaugurated the program's first web and mobile apps. Both are still in beta as of this writing and offer similar functionality. There's only one website and app for both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. An iOS (14.5 or later) as well as an Android (version 9 and later) mobile app are available. One cool new capability in the mobile app is that it lets you share your creations via QR codes.
You can add media from your photo library or the web in the apps, view your media collection, and use two creation tools, Slideshow and Photo Collage, only the first of which applies to video editing. But you don't get timeline or effect edits for videos. For that, see our roundup of the best mobile video editing apps. Since slideshow creation takes a while, the site can send you an email when it's finished, and you can start creating another while that's happening. You can also switch up templates and soundtracks from a choice of a dozen stylish options. Simple text slides let you tell your audience what the slideshow is about.
Purchasers of Elements get 2GB of online storage, and those with Creative Cloud accounts can use whatever storage they have as part of that subscription. Yes, the apps are quite limited at present, but Adobe's documentation for the release states that more features will roll out over time.
Sharing and Output in Premiere Elements
Premiere Elements' export interface gets improvements for the 2025 version, and it now looks very similar to that of Premiere Pro. You get social export choices down the left rail, including YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. You can upload directly from the program's Export page if you log in to those services. But best of all, now you have control over the format, including frame size, frame rate, and bit rate. Saving files tailored for use on mobile devices is also simple.
Premiere Elements no longer offers DVD authoring and burning, however, so if you need to create a physical keepsake of that special event to send out, look at competitors like CyberLink PowerDirector or Corel VideoStudio.
The app offers lots of control over your output files. You can choose Flash, MPEG, AVCHD, AVI, WMV, or QuickTime, with options for all standard resolutions and bitrate targets. But there's no option to export to MKV, WebM, or the more efficient HEVC (aka H.265 format), let alone to the newer, even more efficient AV1 format (though that's not widely supported yet).
The Animated GIF export option is a godsend if you're sharing a very short video to a destination (like a photo spot on a website) that doesn't accept video. Just select Animated GIF from the Format drop-down on the Image tab. It's best to keep the video as short as possible—definitely under 10 seconds—and to choose a lowish resolution. Otherwise, your resulting file will be too large to use on the web.
Quick Export, which outputs to a highly compatible MP4 format, has a standout feature: the Reduce File Size checkbox and a slider that lets you choose the file size of your exported media. This is handy for sharing with services that accept only limited file sizes.
How Does Premiere Elements Perform?
Premiere Elements feels quick to start up and during standard video editing procedures. When it comes to the final rendering of your video editing project, it now acquits itself well, landing among the faster programs. It has significantly improved over the years.
To test rendering speed, each program joins seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p to 8K and applies cross-dissolve transitions between them. I then note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 H.264 with a target 16Mbps bitrate and 192Kbps audio. The output movie is just over five minutes in length and weighs in at about 600MB.
I test on a Windows 11 PC sporting a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. The results are in the table below:
On another performance note, the program did need to shut down unexpectedly during one operation, and as mentioned, the Highlight Reels feature couldn't complete its mission in my testing.
Can You Use Adobe Premiere Elements on macOS?
As mentioned above, Premiere Elements is compatible with macOS 11 and later. It runs natively on Intel- and Apple silicon-based Macs. Unlike Adobe Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements is unfortunately not available from the Mac App Store for easy installation; you need to install it via an intermediary downloader/installer that you download from the Adobe website.
The Mac version offers all the same tools and features as the Windows version that you can read about elsewhere in this review, though the Windows version supports a few file formats that the Mac version doesn't. It can't import WAV, WMA, or WMV files nor export AVI, WAV, WMV, or WMA. For comparison, CyberLink's macOS version of PowerDirector also lacks a few features from the Windows version.
Verdict: For Premiere Pro Wannabes
If you want to dip your toes into the video editing waters and like the integration of the Elements Organizer and Photoshop Elements, Adobe Premiere Elements is a good choice, especially if you're looking for an on-ramp to the company's professional Premiere Pro software. Its interface is modern and clear. However, previous owners of the software should note that Adobe has removed many tools from the last few versions of the software, and it's still not the most powerful enthusiast-level video editor, lacking things like multicam editing and Blu-ray mastering. For more capabilities and better performance, look to our Editors' Choice winner for enthusiast video editing, CyberLink PowerDirector.
Adobe's Premiere Elements video editor gets much closer to its pro-level sibling in design and performance, though it loses some ease of use in the process.
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