While sold separately, the price difference to buy the two programs bundled presents good value, and unless you're producing Hollywood movies on your laptop, Elements will probably suit your need just fine.

Adobe Premiere is the vendor's high-end video-editing software, while, of course, PhotoShop is its flagship photo editing and manipulation software. Both are pricey pieces of powerful software designed for creative professionals, but Elements aims to take just the essential features of those offerings and make them available at a more accessible price-point.

I've been trained on Adobe Premiere Pro at work, but I'm starting to do more video editing at home for personal projects and Windows Movie Maker was a severe crimp on my creativity. So I was excited to install Premiere Elements at home and give it a try.

It took me a little while to figure-out where everything was in Premiere Elements, as the user interface does have some substantial differences from Premiere. Once I found out where everything was though, I found my Premiere skills transferred easily to Elements, and I didn't find myself missing any capabilities.