The latest edition of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, released in early October, improves several existing features and brings some new features to non-professional users. By non-professional, I mean those people who want to use the images and videos they've created to make slide shows, calendars, photo books, and such.
In a future program, we'll consider Premiere Elements, but this week we'll look only at Photoshop Elements and because Adobe has 3 photography applications, it's important to understand the differences.
The Elements applications emphasize easy organization of photos and video clips along with guides for editing and sharing images. Users can create a slide show directly from the organizer. To create a sample slide show, I selected some images, picked a theme, added some text to a title slide, and selected the music I wanted to use.
The Elements application did the rest -- it organized, combined, and arranged the images, handled all of the transitions, and created an output file as an MP4 video. All I had to do was upload it to Vimeo for inclusion on the website.
Adobe Elements Sample Show from Bill Blinn on Vimeo.
The organizer has a new feature called Auto-Curate. Users can turn on this feature to allow the Elements Organizer to review new photos and select the best ones based on image quality, the presence of people, exposure, and more. The feature is surprisingly good at being able to pick the better images.
The overall Photoshop Elements interface hasn't changed much. There are still Quick, Guided, and Expert options and this year's edition offers several new capabilities.
The options are intended to make the program easy for new users but to retain the ability to do more as the user's knowledge grows. The Quick option automatically handles basic photo improvements, but the real fun begins in the Guided interface.
These guided edits introduce edits that are complex and provide step-by-step instructions. There are now 67 Guided Edits across Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Eight are new in this release. We'll take a look at how you might give a photograph a watercolor painting effect.
I started with a photograph of a flower. The instructions are located in a panel on the right. The user only needs to make a few selections to create the watercolor effect.
Some of the steps are shown as optional.
Click any of the smaller images for a full-size view.
To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.
During the editing process, the user can display before and after views arranged either vertically or horizontally. After finishing the edit, you can see how the changes affected the image.
Whenever an image is edited, Photoshop Elements saves a copy of the file so that you can always get back to your original if you decide later that you'd like to use it without the watercolor effect.
Another of the new guided edits in Photoshop Elements allows the user to create double exposures. These are popular, but hard to do manually. And there's a new Artistic Overlay effect that places a shape on top of the image.
On the video side, users can create freeze frames with titles and also use what's called a "bounce-back effects" in which the video runs forward and then backward. This is another effect that would be hard to create without help. That bounce-back effect can be exported as a video clip or an animated GIF.
There's a new Replace Background guided edit that will work well in many cases, but I intentionally selected images that would make the process all but impossible. You might wonder why. As I worked through this I began to comprehend how good the feature is.
The resulting image, while far from perfect, is better than it has any right to be.
Because the image I selected in a raw image, it is first passed to Adobe Camera Raw and then opened in Photoshop Elements.
There's nothing particularly wrong with the background in the picture of the ostrich. In fact, it's quite normal and the replacement background I selected is, at best strange and possibly bizarre.
It's important to understand how difficult it is to mask irregular edges, hair, fur, and whiskers. In other words, masking this ostrich will be all but impossible.
So to make things even worse, I picked the automatic selection tool. Lightroom Elements asked me to draw a rectangle around the subject and then it tried to figure out what I wanted. There are better options, but the result was surprisingly good.
The edges around the ostrich are hard, but given everything that I've thrown in the application's path, I'm impressed with the first step.
The next step involves refining the edges. Although you don't see it here, Photoshop Elements has constructed a mask and using the refinement brush on the picture is actually modifying the mask.
My final step involved moving the ostrich a bit to the right.
And then I clicked the Expert button. This is where users will go as they learn more about how to modify images.
The Expert interface displays the mask that Photoshop Elements created and makes it possible for the user to make adjustments directly on the mask.
As I said at the outset, the resulting image isn't perfect, but it is surprisingly good and with most subjects -- ones that aren't intended to be impossible -- you'll be delighted with the results.
At the end of the process, the file is saved with the layers intact as a Photoshop file (PSD) so that it can be opened and manipulated there as desired.
And of course there's more. How about opening eyes? In group shots, you may find that one person's eyes are closed in what would otherwise be the best of the images. Photoshop Elements can copy the subject's open eyes from another photo and blend them into the one you prefer.
Check out the Photoshop blog where Adobe's Bob Gager shows off some of the new features.
Making photography and videography easier Photoshop Elements packs a lot of power into a $100 application ($80 to upgrade). The upgrade price is good for any previous version of Elements. Upgrading both photo and video applications costs $120. There's also a 30-day trial period, so you can install it and give it a try first.
Additional details are available on the Adobe website.
Business owners and managers are making a more serious effort to combat phishing emails because they are the primary way that crooks gain access to private information as well as the most common way that ransomware attacks are launched. But it's not just businesses.
Although companies are more lucrative targets for more competent crooks, there's no shortage of barely competent crooks who target home users. So home users aren't safe and we all need to be aware of the dangers and the techniques.
A recent report by Intermedia, the Data Vulnerability Report, says that email based attacks and scams cost businesses more than $5 billion between late 2013 and the end of 2016.
For businesses, the crooks have 3 primary objectives: Convince the recipient to make a financial transaction, disclose login credentials, or visit a site that will load malware onto the user's computer.
Home users also face the same 3 primary threats, so they need to take many of the same precautions.
Despite the widely held belief that new employees are responsible for most serious breaches, that's not the case. Assuming the company's IT and security managers know what they're doing, new employees will have restricted rights and even long-term employees won't have access to certain areas.
The Intermedia report says that more than a third of company executives and a quarter of IT workers say that they have been victims of a phishing email. These are the people with greater access to sensitive data and they're the people that crooks want to reach.
Phishing attacks in 2016 were up 65% according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a worldwide partnership of businesses and government agencies. The report says that attacks are becoming harder to spot and more employees are tricked into clicking a poisoned link.
The number of phishing websites identified is rarely fewer than 70,000 per month according to the APWG and hit nearly 119,000 in November of last year.
Companies are increasingly trying to educate employees about the dangers. Some of these efforts provide charts that highlight some of the signs that an employee could use to spot a malicious email. Nearly 90% of office workers surveyed said that they feel confident in their ability to detect phishing emails, but more than 20% admit being fooled. Millennials seem to be more adept at spotting a phishing email than their older co-workers.
Some companies even send phishing messages to employees as training exercises. In some cases, the IT department sends the messages and some companies hire outside firms to handle the task. Users who click on poisoned links may be taken to a site that explains what warning signs were present in the phony phish.
Increasingly, companies have begun providing awareness training as part of the on-boarding process and then communicating a cyber-security message to all employees. Often, companies appoint cyber-security advocates on a departmental or team basis. These employees are given additional training and co-workers are encouraged to report problems to these advocates.
Companies that do this best encourage employees to be aware of threats at home, too. They explain that security practices used at the office have real-world benefits at home, too. The goal is to make cyber-security a top-of-mind concern for everyone.
But companies also need to understand that no matter how good their security precautions are and no matter how well employees are trained, some threats will break through. That's why they also need to be prepared to react when the worst happens.
Well, you won't receive reminders from the IT department or test phishing emails, so it's even more important to educate yourself about the dangers and to develop your own protective measures.
Some of those protective measures can be software based. I have recently started using Microsoft Security Essentials with Windows 10 instead of using one of the mainstream 3rd-party anti-virus applications. Additionally, I use Malwarebytes and Ransom Free from Cyberreason. Malwarebytes has both free and paid versions for home users (the paid version is worth the cost to me). Cyberreason offers only a free application for home use, but has paid options for businesses.
No matter how good these applications are, though, my first line of defense has to be caution and suspicion. Think before clicking, in other words. But I could make a mistake and that's why backup is so critical. If there's anything on your computer that you consider important, it should be backed up.
A new version of Exposure X3 is out and Alien Skin says that it offers both some new features and faster processing speed. It runs as a plug-in for Adobe's photo applications and also as a stand-alone application.
Photographers can organize, edit, enhance, and export their photos from within Exposure or use Lightroom to handle organization and pass some of the editing tasks to Exposure.
The new version includes color and monochrome toning enhancements with a side-by-side view to allow comparison of multiple images or to test several presets on a single image. Linear and radial gradient tools allow transitioning between two or more effects.
Those who use Exposure to organize photos will find a new function that allows users to create virtual copies of images to create several stylized versions of a photo without having to duplicate the images.
Exposure can now be used to copy images from the camera and to select the images with the greatest potential. File management and image rating are provided for organization and meta-data tools allow for searching and sorting.
One of Exposure's strongest features has always been its ability to emulate the look of images from film. It reproduces the look of hundreds of analog film types, including the size, shape, and color of film grain. A library of presets gives photographers starting points that can then be modified.
Exposure X3 is available now for $150 ($100 upgrade) and it's also included in the Exposure X3 Bundle with Blow Up and Snap Art. The bundle costs $200 with upgrades from any of the applications set at $120. There's also a 30-day fully-featured free trial.
For more information, visit the Alien Skin website.
When designers are looking for an image, they often have something specific in mind. For example, a picture of a cat with space on the right for text. Stock image company Shutterstock is trying to make the process of finding such an image easier.
Composition Aware Search is currently in beta and it allows users to specify one or more keywords, to search for images with space for copy, and limit the results to images that have objects in specific arrangements.
The process uses what Shutterstock refers to as "a combination of machine vision, natural language processing, and state of the art information retrieval techniques" with "complex spatially aware search criteria." This is described in a complex white paper that's heavy on math, but perhaps an illustration might work better.
Well, let's say that I'm looking for a picture of a cat. Of course I am, what else would I be looking for? But I'd also like to have some space on the right where I could place some text. I have placed the cat icon on the left and the text icon on the right, out near the edge.
Some of the images aren't quite a match, so keep in mind that this is still in beta.
Maybe I'd like a bit more space for text.
So now I've moved the text icon back from the edge and more of the returned images have a considerable amount of space on the right where text could be placed.
Click any of the smaller images for a full-size view.
To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.
Or maybe I'd like a cat on the left and a dog on the right.
How about a dog in the foreground and a cat in the background. There seem to be more misses here.
Let me explain why I selected a dog and a cat: It's easy for people to tell them apart, but to an automated process, I have to think that dogs and cats look a lot alike. They're both fuzzy and often not much different in size, so the resulting images are surprisingly accurate.
Two more, this time with a dog and a cat with space for text ad the top or at the bottom.
Clearly, the process isn't perfect, but it has a lot of promise and I think it will prove to be both welcome and useful even in beta.
Once the user has identified an appropriate image, it can be licensed and then modified as needed.
Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer says the model not only learns what things are, also where things are. For marketers who are searching for an image with copy space, he says "using this tool will save a significant amount of time." Composition Aware Search joins other search techniques in Shutterstock's arsenal: Reverse Image Search and Visually Similar Search, which were launched last year.
Shutterstock provides licensed photographs, vectors images, illustrations, videos, and music and its 250,000 contributors add hundreds of thousands of images each week.
