[Software] Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 review

[Aronus]

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 is the latest version of a long-running Photoshop alternative that’s designed more for beginners and amateurs and comes with no subscription, just a one-off license fee (though with a fixed 3-year term). You can get it on its or bundled with Adobe Premiere Elements which, as the name suggests, is a similarly beginner friendly version of the Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software.

On price alone, Photoshop Elements 2025 deserves to be considered alongside the best photo editing software. If you want to save even more money, take a look at the best free photo editing software too – though Elements 2025 is not expensive. 

There’s an additional program in this little family – the Elements 2025 Organizer. This is a powerful little cataloguing applications that supports albums and search tools, and acts as a kind of central hub for both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements.

Photoshop Elements offers many of the tools you’ll find in Photoshop, but presented in a very different way. There’s a Quick Fix mode where you choose variations in color or exposure to try to get your images looking your best, but you’re likely to learn a lot more from the Guided Edit mode.

This is quite clever. It offers a whole catalog of common fixes and effects you might want to carry out – there are 59 different Guided Edits in this version – and then walks you through each process. Along the way you’ll find out how different editing tools work so that if you want to sidestep any of these processes and get straight to hands-on editing, you can switch to the Advanced mode with a good grounding in what many of these tools do.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 at Amazon for $99.99
It’s pretty clear where Elements’ focus lies, however – and it’s fun projects you can create with your photos rather than photography itself. It can carry out a range of regular photo enhancements and effects, but it’s no Photoshop (or Lightroom).

In fact it’s worth pointing out that although Lightroom might be considered a rather more advanced alternative, it is potentially  both simpler to use and to understand that the multitude of options in Elements, while for those interested in memes, flashy social graphics and multimedia clips, then the web-based Adobe Express might be a better option.

For anyone tempted to upgrade from an older version to Photoshop Elements 2025, there is a lot that’s new. The new features are more to do with jazzy effects and easier enhancements than any fundamental changes, but they’re still worth a closer look.

For example, Elements 2025 now has AI object removal, so that you can paint over any unwanted object and the AI will cover it convincingly using surrounding image details. There’s a new Guided Edit to walk you through the process.

Elements 2025 also gets the depth of field blur previously introduced in Lightroom. Again, this uses AI to separate subjects from their backgrounds, and it works rather well. Confusingly, this is a filter in the Advanced mode. There is a Depth of Field Guided Edit which sounds like it should be it but isn’t – this uses a tilt shift effect or a very crude kind of subject selection.

You can now use the automatic selection tools to change the color of any object, though the blending isn’t always realistic and it relies on old-school selection tools which can be slow and painstaking to use – this would work so much better with the AI subject selection tools common in other software.

We are also supposed now to be able to “seamlessly” combine multiple backgrounds, objects and other elements, though this seems to simply stack them in layers and present you with basic foreground and background selection tools.

There are four new Quick Actions, including one to create cinematograph-like animations of objects and areas within a still image, and this is quite neat, though with no preview option you have to export it to find out what it looks like.

Adobe has also released a web companion and a mobile app to go with Elements 2025, though so far these are only beta versions.

There is a lot that’s new in Elements 2025, but it’s built on top of an interface and a workflow that’s definitely showing its age.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 is available now direct from the Adobe website and costs $99.99 / £86.99, AU$145.99, while the Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 & Premiere Elements 2025 bundle costs $149.99 / £130.49 / AU$219.99. However, note the following in Adobe's license agreement: "Photoshop Elements 2025 is now sold as a full 3-year term license with no monthly or annual recurring subscription" So it's not on a subscription, but it's not a perpetual license either. That's a real sting in the tail. It’s still less than the Adobe Photography Plan over a three-year period, but then you are getting rather less for your money.

 

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 review | Digital Camera World