Adobe considers the audience for its Premiere Elements 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 should consider it. In addition to being easy to use, Premiere Elements lets you go fairly deep with multitrack and keyframe-based editing. Or you can ignore all that and use the slick automated tools. Ultimately, however, the program trails Editors' Choice winner CyberLink PowerDirector in terms of the breadth of available effects, rendering speed, and supported formats.
You can get Premiere Elements in a bundle with Photoshop Elements for $149.99 or by itself for $99.99. Those prices are one-time fees—but there's a catch: A license is good only for a period of three years. Previously, these licenses were perpetual. 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. Note that Premiere Elements is not a part of Adobe's Creative Cloud service.
For comparison, CyberLink PowerDirector is available as a $79.99-per-year subscription or a one-time payment of $139.99 for the Ultimate version, which lacks stock and AI features. Corel VideoStudio Pro costs $99.99, with no subscription option. Pinnacle Studio Ultimate goes for $129.99, and it's powerful and consumer-friendly, too.
The latest version of Premiere Elements finally brings support for 360-degree VR footage—something that's been in competing applications like PowerDirector for nearly a decade. That's the headliner, but the new edition also features several other notable updates. Surprisingly, none of them involve generative AI, in stark contrast with its Photoshop Elements stablemate. It also doesn't add any new Guided Edits, which I've come to expect with each update. In any case, here are the most important changes:
360-degree VR support. You can change the point of view of your footage as well as add graphics, text, and transitions.
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Adobe Stock. Take advantage of Adobe's royalty-free media library.
Delete All Gaps. A useful tool that's available in competing apps, this removes all the empty space from a cluttered timeline.
Freehand crop. Crop your video frames as if they were photos.
Media import via cloud. You can now add media to Elements directly from cloud services, such as Google Drive and OneDrive.
New text options. Now, you can use style templates and motion title templates. Multicolor fonts are also new.
No more mobile or web apps. Adobe has discontinued the mobile Premiere Elements app and halted the web version. You can, however, use online storage. You get 2GB but can upgrade to 1TB for $9.99 per month.
The 2025 version of Elements was a more significant revamp, bringing the interface much closer to Adobe's professional video editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro. This could be a pro or a con, depending on your point of view. It also introduced a few new options and features. For example, it added Motion Titles that take advantage of Motion Graphics templates from After Effects, along with color correction and grading capabilities, including white balance LUT support.
The software runs on Microsoft Windows 10 (version 22H2, 64-bit) or 11 (version 23H2 or later) and macOS 14.4 or later. Make sure you have a fast internet connection and a spacious hard drive (preferably an SSD) before installing the program. You need a reasonably powerful machine with an 8th-gen or newer Intel processor or the AMD equivalent with AVX2 and SSE4.2 support, at least 8GB of RAM (16GB for HD media or higher), 7GB of hard drive space, and 4GB VRAM. The app requires at least a 1,280-by-800-pixel resolution monitor. Additionally, Windows users need SSE2 support on the CPU and a DirectX 12-compatible graphics card. Premiere Elements natively supports Apple silicon but not Windows on Arm.
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 still opens the functional beta web version of Elements in your default browser, even though Adobe has announced that it's discontinuing this feature.
You can set the Organizer to automatically import media from watched folders, including those you link to Google Drive or OneDrive storage.
View 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 clear buttons let you filter 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 button. Another 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.
Adobe Stock in Premiere Elements
In previous versions, I've criticized Premiere Elements for not including stock media, especially since Adobe Stock is available. Thankfully, the 2026 version rights that wrong: You can now find audio (background music tracks), photos, sfx (sound effects), and video clips from Adobe Stock in a side panel. You don't get access to the full Adobe Stock collection (which can get expensive), but the available assets are of high quality.
I like this implementation. You can browse content by category, such as Abstract, or search for assets directly. It's even possible to sort results by downloads, recency, and relevance. You can scrub through video thumbnails by hovering the cursor over them. When I clicked to download a satellite video, I was given a choice between HD and 4K. After that, I could simply add the clip to the timeline.
The video editing interface has three mode tabs: Quick, Guided, and Expert. In recent versions, it's gotten closer to that of Adobe Premiere Pro. The Home and Organizer buttons are on the left side rail, while an X closes the right-side editing panel. The initial editor interface has a similar look; gone are the large buttons for trimming and combining clips.
Quick mode has a simplified timeline and closes some side panels while still letting you use more-advanced tools like color correction from the right-side toolbar. It's closer to Advanced and Guided than in earlier versions.
In Advanced mode, you get the standard timeline across the bottom with all the details, 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.
Choosing File > New > Project from the menus offers a choice of aspect ratios for the movie. You can't change the frame rate or size during editing, but you can 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 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 eye or speaker icons at the head of the timeline. You can zoom the timeline in and out with the mouse wheel while holding down the Alt key, and a Fit to Visible Timeline button and the zoom slider work well. You can't pop out panels into separate windows, but you can use a dual-monitor setup. A final interface annoyance is that not all Premiere Elements windows 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 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 that 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. You can still access all the tools on the right rail in this mode now, including color editing, effects, time remapping, and transitions. One puzzling omission is that you don't get the new Delete All Gaps option on the timeline in Quick mode.
Highlight Reel: Instant Movies
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 are the norm on all social video platforms. 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.
It fills in the empty areas of the 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. In testing, this merely changed the color tones of my project. You can further edit the result 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. The results didn't impress me, as they merely added the same transition to trimmed versions of my clips. I enjoy PowerDirector's Auto Editing tool far more, which also supports text titles.
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.
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 and Dehaze
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).
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.
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Color Correction and Grading
Another powerful tool in Premiere Elements is the 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.
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. The 2026 updated didn't add any new ones, which is unusual. Simply tap the Guided Edits mode-switcher button to see them all. You see all the options in a left-side panel. You have to download each one before you can use it, which is good for lowering the initial program download size.
Guided Edits no longer overlay the part of the interface where you need to do something; instead, they're just short, small videos in steps that show you the process. In previous versions, you couldn't advance to the next step without successfully completing the previous one, but now you can by just pressing the forward arrow. Below is an example of this 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.
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. The Video Collage feature (accessible from the Create button) lets you 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.
Selections in Effects
In the Effect Controls panel's Opacity section, you see masking options for using a Pen, Circle, or Rectangle. The Pen is what lets you create masks for irregularly shaped objects such as human beings. You can tune your selection with feathering, opacity, and expansion sliders. The Pen selection is touchy compared with selecting in Photoshop; it helps if you have Illustrator experience. You can make multiple selections, as well as invert the selection. The latter is useful if 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.
You have two ways to add text titles to your video: You can use the Text tools, which show up as a T to the left of the timeline, or the Titles and Shapes panel from the main left-hand toolbar.
When you enter text with the Text Tool, you can take advantage of the new style browser, which pops up in a left-hand panel. It offers arresting preset styles that you can customize. Alternatively, you can create a style that meets other specifications.
With the template options, you get a choice of over 100 preset Motion Titles. 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.
Before you can work with your 360-degree VR footage, you need to stitch it together. This process involves combining the two hemispherical images that comprise the full scene into an equirectangular frame. Some competitors, such as PowerDirector, do the stitching for you, but you can also do this via your camera maker's software. For illustration purposes, here's an unstitched 180-degree stereoscopic image:
And here's a stitched equirectangular frame:
The latest version of Premiere Elements features a button below the video preview that allows you to switch the view of the stitched equirectangular frame to a normal perspective. You can either set a project to a selection of VR formats at the start or simply drag a 360-degree clip onto the timeline and let Premiere Elements choose the correct one. In this corrected view, you can freely pan around the image. Below is the previous clip after toggling Premiere Elements' VR display:
Elements supports a lot of video editing options for 360 content, including effects, text titles, transitions, and trimming. It even supports Ambisonics surround sound audio.
Unfortunately, the app does not offer a way to create a standard 2D output from 3D, unlike PowerDirector and other similar tools. This allows you to play the director and show only the part of the view you want. Element's 360-degree support is specifically designed for editing content intended for VR headsets, a task at which it excels.
Audio tools were completely revamped for the 2025 version. 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, like in many other video editors, but the Audio mixer is now a separate pop-up 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 Audio Track, MP3 file, or Music Score, and is on by default for sound you place in the music track part of the timeline. Across 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' export interface 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.
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 improved significantly in recent updates.
To test rendering speeds, I have each program join seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p to 8K and apply 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 with a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. I run the test five times and apply a harmonic mean function to the results, which minimizes the effect of outliers.
On another performance note, the program did need to shut down unexpectedly during one operation.
Premiere Elements lacks a screen-cam recording feature, which allows you to create videos of your desktop activity on your computer screen. This is possible in Corel VideoStudio Pro and PowerDirector. It also doesn't support multicam editing, which lets you sync the same scene shot with different cameras at different angles. Both Magix Movie Edit Pro and PowerDirector, among others, offer that capability. Another missing tool, largely from a bygone era, is DVD burning.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Adobe)
Adobe Premiere Elements
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
If you want to dip your toes into the video editing waters (and especially if you're looking for an on-ramp to Adobe's professional-level Premiere Pro), Premiere Elements is a good choice. Its interface is modern and clear, and we like the wide range of video effects and controls it provides. The introduction of Adobe Stock assets is a welcome change, too. However, previous owners of the software should note that Adobe has removed some tools in the latest versions. The program also lacks some features found in other alternatives, such as Blu-ray mastering and multicam editing. For more capabilities and better performance, look to our Editors' Choice winner for enthusiast video editing, CyberLink PowerDirector.
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About Our Expert
I've been testing PC and mobile software for more than 20 years, focusing on photo and video editing, operating systems, and web browsers. Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech and headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team. I’ve attended trade shows for Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.
I still get a kick out of seeing what's new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft misstep and win, up to the latest Windows 11.
I’m an avid bird photographer and traveler—I’ve been to 40 countries, many with great birds! Because I’m also a classical music fan and former performer, I’ve reviewed streaming services that emphasize classical music.
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