Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8

Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements are powerful tools for photo editing (Photoshop) and video editing (Premiere).

The latest versions of both programs will appeal to anyone that has a large collection of digital photos or home videos piling up on a PC. They can be picked up individually for £75 each, or together as a set for £115, which is good value if you have both photos and videos to deal with.

The third program in the box, Organizer, was introduced with the previous edition, and in some ways is the most useful part of the package (the Organizer is also included if you buy either program on its own: it’s not necessary to buy them together to get it).

As the name implies, the Organizer is a program that allows users to preview and organize photos and video files, grouping them into themed albums or assigning keywords and ratings so that the library can be searched through more quickly. There’s a new people-recognition feature in the Organizer which allows users to select someone’s face in a photo and mark it with that person’s name.

The Organizer will then automatically scan through the photo library and attempt – quite successfully in our tests – to group all photos of that person together.

The Organizer also includes a feature called the auto-analyser, which works with both photos and videos. It can analyse the entire contents of your library and can tell the difference between photos that contain a single face or a group shot containing several faces, or between shots that are too dark or too bright. It can check the audio volume on video clips or check for video clips that might be a bit blurred or shaky. You can then quickly discard poor-quality material and just concentrate on the photos and video clips that you’re interested in.

Once you’ve located your photos or videos in the Organizer you can then open them up and edit them in either Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements. This time around there’s no long list of new editing features in Photoshop Elements, but we did like the improved Quick Fix tools, which include multiple previews so that it’s possible to see how different settings will affect the photos.

There are more new tools on the video side of things: Premiere Elements has now got a Smart Fix feature that automatically adjusts colour and lighting in video clips, and can even help to make shaky hand-held shots look a lot steadier and clearer. There are a number of new special effects, including a fun animation option that lets users link superimposed graphics to moving people or objects within video clips.

That combination of powerful editing tools and intelligent organisation of photos and video clips makes this an excellent all-in-one software suite for anyone interested in digital video and photography.