If you received a portable music player as a gift this year, there’s really not much more to be said than “happy listening.”
Music, after all, requires little more than stuffing a set of earbuds into one’s aural canals and fretting over premature hearing loss.
But it’s a cigar of an entirely different color when one receives a digital camera or a digital camcorder.
Then one faces a big choice: software or Walgreens? Will you take your memory cards and digital tapes somewhere for printing/processing, or will you do it yourself?
Today’s plan is to review Adobe’s impressive new photo and filmmaking software known as Photoshop Elements 4.0 and Premier Elements 2.0.
But first, I’m going to explain how to use some elements built in to Microsoft Windows XP to see if do-it-yourself imaging is your cup of tea.
The rudimentary Paint module in Windows easily accepts images from camera cards and permits cutting, cropping, reshaping, titling and other tools that greatly enhance photos. Click on Start and All Programs and Accessories and then Paint to get started.
The even better Movie Maker component of Windows XP will capture video from camcorders and then deliver sophisticated editing tools that permit clip editing, transitions, titling, frame tweaking, soundtrack creation and other video tools. Sometimes Movie Maker is put under Accessories along with Paint, but mostly it appears as one of the software titles listed under Start/All Programs.
Both Paint and Movie Maker work after one plugs a digital camera or a camcorder into the computer’s USB or Firewire ports and moves the photos or video clips onto the hard drive. With mobile-phone images and stuff downloaded from the Internet, one drags and drops files into the editing software.
For those intrigued by the possibilities of self-edited graphics, an awesome array of software products awaits. These include gems like VideoWave built into the Roxio Easy Media Creator software, Sony’s Screenblast Movie Studio, Ulead’s VideoStudio and CyberLink’s DVD Solution.
Now Adobe enters the fray like the Goliath it is with a $149 bundled package for consumers. It includes Photoshop Elements 4.0 and Premier Elements 2.0, which are simplified versions of the company’s professional software that dominates the visual graphics industry.
Both Adobe consumer versions include as much as 90 percent of the features of their powerful parents, and I’d argue there are few who need the full-blown software. In fact, the biggest weakness of either Elements program is that they are so full of tools that a user must do some serious practicing to get the hang of it all.
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But if ever something in personal computing was worth spending some time learning, it is Adobe’s Elements package.
Photoshop Elements 4.0 amounts to some interesting tweaking of earlier versions of Elements. If you’re well established with 3.0, there’s little reason to upgrade. But if you start with 4.0, you’re in for digital delights.
The software presents a list of tools in a vertical bar to the left and the image covers the rest of the screen unless one uses the superb hand-holding help modules that appear to the far right and walk you through each move.
This help element not only offers simple instructions for using whichever tool is active, but it also gives a preview of each operation as it is tried. This simplifies learning these incredible tools–honed over almost two decades–that Adobe has provided the graphics departments of the world’s businesses.
Elements 4.0 also includes a powerful photo tracking feature that lets users keep track of thousands of images, recall them by keywords or contact sheets and even display data like the time and date shot, aperture/speed and other data kept by digital cameras.
If you’re bringing a camcorder to the party, Premier delivers Hollywood studio caliber creation that can get just as fancy and startling as most of us can imagine.
You can add brightness and contrast to dark shots to emulate daylight. All of the editing uses the professional key frame process that permits undetectable scene changes. Opacity and overlay tools permit split screens, picture in picture and enough motion/color/sound flourishes to make moviemaking psychedelic as well as slickly professional.
Other movie software includes simplified tools to create special effects, but Premier 2.0 delivers the tools to create from scratch such cinema tweaks. You’ll soon realize that you can do almost anything you can think of with this powerhouse.
The programs work together, with the moviemaking Premier using the Photoshop Elements picture catalogs to track clips and to edit special frames–such as DVD menus and titles. And Premier takes Photoshop images and turns out slide shows and special effects.
Fired up together, Adobe’s digital duo can make you think you are at least the equal of that king of PBS documentaries, Ken Burns, if not George Lucas himself striding the Star Wars sets.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.James Coates