In the section below, I outline some of Premiere Elements’ more powerful tools for correcting your video productions’ color, lighting, framing, and more, whether for the widescreen or the small screen.
Auto Reframe
Auto Reframe, as it sounds, fits a clip to a different aspect ratio than it was shot in. The tool, accessible from a button above the timeline or in the right-side F/X panel’s Transform group, uses Adobe Sensei AI to determine what’s important in the frame and crops to show only that. In my testing, it worked almost instantly, and unlike my attempts with early similar tools in Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut, it kept the subject centered, as you can see in the sample here. I’ve shown the clip in its original aspect ratio in the source viewer on the left. If you’re not happy with the crop, you can adjust its offset, position, scale, and rotation from the Applied F/X panel.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Smart Trim
Premiere Elements’ Smart Trim identifies poor-quality sections of your media and can delete them all at once. Style choices—People, Action, and Mix—affect what sections of the clips it retains. It automatically selected Action for my bike stunt test video, and trim suggestions appeared instantly. You can preview the suggested trims. The app did a good job of selecting the most active scenes, though one short section was dull, and some farther-away skateboard tricks weren’t included. It also removed out-of-focus and shaky sections, which I appreciated. Handles let you easily extend the selections, and you can simply use the Delete key to remove one. If you have long footage of limited interest, Smart Trim is helpful.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Video Stabilization
Premiere Elements lets you apply video stabilization from either Quick or Expert mode by choosing Shake Stabilizer from the Adjust panel. There are two methods of stabilization accessible from buttons—Quick and Detailed. Quick isn’t that quick, however. My 1:35-minute clip took about 10 minutes to stabilize in Quick mode. At least Premiere Elements shows you the progress—minutes left, percent done, and current frame.
After that, a banner message says, “To avoid extreme cropping, set Framing to Stabilize Only or adjust other parameters.” In my testing, I had to go into the Detailed panel and choose Advanced, where I had a lot of choices, such as smoothness, crop percent, and edge feather. It’s a powerful tool, but you need patience for long clips. Even setting Smoothness to 100% doesn’t always fix large bumps. One cool choice is Synthesize Edges, which prevents cropping.
Color Match
The Color Match tool isn’t meant to produce consistent natural colors between clips to account for different cameras and lighting but instead serves as a dazzling effect. Note how the river below takes on the exact colors of the football game for a hardly realistic image. Furthermore, the trees take on the colors of the players’ uniforms, the water is the color of the grass, and the clouds match the lamps on the building near the playing field.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Reduce Grainy Noise and Dehaze
The Reduce Noise tool is another example of bringing something from photo editing to video editing. Amusingly, the program has long had a tool for adding noise as an effect, but not a correction. You simply drag the Reduce Noise icon from the F/X panel on the right, and then the adjustments for the tool open. You get only three settings for the amount of noise reduction: Default, Medium, and High. It’s not going to turn a horribly noisy clip into a great one, but it does smooth out overly grainy shots, and you can apply the correction to a mask selection (see below).
Dehaze, a feature that has made its way into a lot of photo editing software, is available from Premiere Elements’ Effects panel’s Advanced Adjustment section. It did a fine job of adding contrast and saturation to my test landscape footage, as you can see in the screenshot below.
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Color Correction and Grading
Another powerful tool in Premiere Elements is the Color Correction and Grading panel, accessible from the Tools button on the right toolbar. This comprises both standard correction tools like white balance and exposure, LUTs, a Creative section, and Curves. Perhaps the most interesting section is Creative, which offers color wheels for highlights and shadows, Faded Film, and Vibrance settings. The Basic section includes an Auto button to apply the program’s best guess as to the correct color balance. You get both input LUTs for matching camera models’ inputs (some of the units are unlikely for people using consumer software like Elements, such as ARRI Log C4). There are also a lot of fun LUTs to apply in the Creative section, such as Candlelight, Futuristic Bleak, and Sunset Silhouette.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
