Expert rating
Benefits
- Wide range of video editing tools
- Quick mode and guided edits for beginners
- Powerful color correction tools
- Good tools for creating text and titles
Disadvantages
- Even fast mode is quite complex
- Now sold with only a three-year license
- Dense and unnecessary documentation
Our Verdict
It is certainly a powerful video editing tool with advanced features for creating titles and artistic effects. However, Premiere Elements isn’t easy to learn and can be too complex for people who just want to post to Instagram.
Price when reviewed
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Best price today
$99.99
Best prices today: Adobe Premiere Elements
$99.99
Premiere Elements is the companion product to Photoshop Elements (see our review) and is designed to provide powerful video editing tools at a competitive price. There are less expensive video editing apps for Mac, but many of them simply focus on relatively simple tools for trimming video clips and applying filters and effects for use on social media. In contrast, Premiere Elements provides powerful and precise editing tools that allow you to create complex video projects using multiple video and audio clips. It also includes a variety of text tools for creating titles, as well as a very wide range of creative filters and effects that can create the ideal look and feel for your videos.
However, this extra power means that Premiere Elements is more complex than some of its competitors – and also more complex than Photoshop Elements, despite the similarities between the two programs.
Photoshop Elements – How much does it cost?
Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements were traditionally sold for a one-time fee of $99.99/£86.99, which allowed you to use the programs for as long as you wanted (although you had to pay additional fees if you wanted to purchase their annual upgrades as well). The 2025 editions of both programs still cost the same, but the purchase price now only grants you a three-year license, meaning you’ll need to purchase another license in three years.
That’s the bad news, but the good news is that you will get future upgrades, such as the 2026 and 2027 editions, for free because they will likely be released within this three-year license period. It’s also possible to purchase both Elements programs together for $149.99/£130.49 (which again is a three-year license). A seven-day free trial is also available, so you can see if Premiere Elements is right for your own experience level. Purchasing Premiere Elements for Mac also gives you access to the mobile version of the app – although it’s been in beta for several years now, so you should probably make sure to back up any video files you save to your mobile. devices to ensure their safety.
Like Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements offers three different editing modes, with three tabs at the top of the main editing window – Quick, Guided and Advanced – designed to cater to users with different experience levels.
Quick mode is designed for beginners and provides a simple workspace with a horizontal stage line at the bottom of the screen where you can drag and drop video clips and quickly arrange them in the required order. Above the Stage Row is the Program Monitor window, which provides a larger view of individual video clips so you can view each clip with frame-by-frame precision and decide where to make cuts or other edits. There’s also a palette to the right of the window that provides several additional tools, including a series of artistic effects, such as oil paints, reflections, and black and white effects. However, even in quick mode, some of these tools are quite complex, with multiple slider controls for adjusting parameters and timings that can confuse less experienced users.
Fortunately, like Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements also has a Guided Mode that provides step-by-step help with some of these more complex tools. There are guided edits that show you how to create time-lapse effects, lighting adjustments, titles, and other effects. And, for real beginners, there are two options that can do all the work for you and automatically create a Highlight Reel or video collage. All you need to do here is import a few video clips and Premiere Elements will edit the clips together, add transitions, and even provide a selection of music clips for the soundtrack.
Premiere Elements – What’s new?
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Foundry
More experienced users can jump straight to advanced mode, which provides full access to the program’s wide range of editing tools, audio features, filters, and effects. Most of the new features introduced for the 2025 edition can also be found here.
At first glance, Advanced Mode looks similar to Quick Mode – although the Quick Mode scene is now called the Timeline, indicating that more advanced features are available in this mode. The timeline has been changed for this 2025 version, with audio and video tracks grouped for clarity, and the ability to lock tracks to prevent accidental changes.
There’s a new Quick Tools palette to the left of the timeline, which provides instant access to features like the Scissors tool for splitting clips and the Text tool for adding titles. The program’s text tools have also been improved, with controls for quickly adjusting text size, alignment, and direction of movement. You can also download new templates to help you create stylish animated titles. There are improved tools for color correction and white balance adjustment, which control the brightness of white areas in an image, such as clouds or snow. However, some of these color tools will challenge even more advanced users, and we found ourselves trawling through the unhelpful help files on Adobe’s website to learn the differences between color grading and color correction.
There are also changes to the program’s options for importing and exporting files, which should be useful to all users regardless of their experience level. When you start a new project, you’ll see the redesigned Media panel that opens on the left of the screen and makes importing files into your projects faster and easier. There are also new export options that help you prepare your video files for social media and other platforms, starting with the Quick Export button that provides preset options covering a variety of different quality settings and resolutions . The updated export tool now opens a large window that provides more detailed settings for audio and video files. And a huge time saver is the ability to simultaneously export multiple versions of the same file that can be customized for use on different social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
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Foundry
Should you buy Premiere Elements?
There’s no doubt that Premiere Elements is an incredibly powerful program for video editing work, and it’s excellent value for money for more advanced amateurs and semi-professional users such as podcasters and vloggers. Even so, it’s quite complex software, even in quick mode, so newcomers will need to be willing to roll up their sleeves and do a little work to fully master the program’s undeniably powerful editing tools. .
For more video editing apps, check out our roundup of the best free and cheap Mac video editors. We also have a guide to the best Macs for video editing.
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