Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 review

Pros

+ Subscription-free and reasonably priced
+ Guided Edits to walk you through the editing tools
+ A companion Organizer for photos and videos
+ AI object removal and depth of field

Cons

– Very basic raw processing
– Old-fashioned and inflexible workflow
– Guided Edits often use old and crude tools
– Instant fixes, Quick Fixes, Guided edits, Advanced mode… there are too many paths
– Cheeky new three-year license!

What is Photoshop Elements 2025?

For a long time, Adobe has sold ‘Elements’ versions of Photoshop and its video editor Premiere Pro, which are designed to be simpler and cheaper versions aimed at beginners. They drop many of the advanced professional features of these programs and add in guided projects and simplified enhancements to help new users do exciting things with their creations without getting bamboozled by jargon.

You can get Photoshop Elements 2025 on its own for $99.99 / £86.99 or as a bundle with Premiere Elements 2025 too for $149.99 / £130.49. Both options come with a standalone Organizer program which runs alongside them. The appeal of the Elements family is that you’re not entering into a subscription, so you can carry on using these programs for as long as you like – or that’s what USED to happen. In fact, Adobe has slipped in a different license agreement that’s fixed at a three-year term. You can’t just buy Elements once and use it for ever. 

I have just reviewed Photoshop Elements 2025 for Digital Camera World, and I will try as far as possible to avoid saying the same things all over again in the same way, but I can’t help making the same points here.

Photoshop Elements 2025 interface and usability

There are three ways to launch Elements 2025 and get to work. There is a home screen shared with Premiere Elements (if installed) that asks you what you want to do next and then launches the appropriate program. Or you can launch the Organizer and choose images to work on there,  or launch the Elements editor to open images directly.

The choices continue. Within the Editor there are three modes. Quick Fix mode is for basic, jargon-free enhancements. Guided Mode has no fewer than 59 (in this version) walkthrough processes for basic enhancements, special effects and fun projects, and walks you through each process, showing you the tools and techniques step by step. There’s also Advanced mode, which is more like a mini-Photoshop, with a regular photo-editing interface and tools. For example, you get basic adjustments like layers and masks but not curves.

There’s a fourth option. The Organizer has an Instant Fix mode, which is a little like the Editor’s Quick Fix mode, but with some different options and effects. This is one of my complaints about Elements – it tries so hard to be friendly and offers so many routes into editing, that beginners could quickly lose any sense of what’s going on and which option is supposed to be the best to start with. 

I do like the Guided Edits – or at least I like the idea behind them. What better way to gradually learn how photo editing tools work than to be shown them in action, step by step, as you create something new?

I do think, though, that their potential results are often seriously oversold. One of the ‘new’ features is a color swap Guided Edit which, you might hope, would leverage Adobe’s latest AI object masking technologies as found in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. But no, it relies on old-fashioned selection brush and magic wand tools which sometimes work well but often don’t. It’s the same with the Combine Photos Guided Edit. “Seamlessly combine multiple photos”, it says. Sounds promising. In fact it simply enlarges your photo’s canvas to make a little extra space, displays a panel for selecting new images and offers selection and masking tools from a previous decade. A Photoshop expert could make this work pretty well, but then a Photoshop expert wouldn’t be using Elements.

In fairness, other Guided Edits work well. Object Removal brings Adobe’s latest AI tools to bear on a common photo-editing problem and works much better than simple cloning or even content aware fill. And there are a host of projects for creating fun graphics or image effects, such as Peek-Through Overlays, Meme Makers, Puzzle Effects, Zoom Burst, Pop Art and more. If you just want to make fun social media content or gifts, it’s fine, but it’s not fine art. 

I also approve of the new Lens Blur filter, which uses the same AI tech as Lightroom to figure out 3D depth in 2D images, though this is only on the Filter menu and not to be confused with the Depth of Field Guided Edit, which is older and more primitive. There it is again –  too many similar things in too many different places.

Photoshop Elements 2025 results

The results achieved with Photoshop Elements would be a lot better with the help of Adobe’s latest AI subject recognition and masking. As it is, it feels like Elements is being slowly drip-fed morsels of technology but remains very much an old-fashioned product being kept firmly in its place in the Adobe hierarchy.

You can get good results from the Editor in Advanced mode because this is as much down to the skills and patience of the user and finding workarounds for any limitations. But there are plenty of those. We take the ability to edit 16-bit images for granted these days, as these are the standard output for RAW files. But only a few Elements processes can support 16-bit color – you are repeatedly forced to convert to 8-bit color, especially when using Guided Edits, which don’t support anything else. 

There’s more bad news for RAW shooters. The Organizer can’t edit RAW files seamlessly alongside regular JPEGs like Lightroom can. Instead, you have to run them through Adobe Camera Raw first to create a new, editable file.

That’s not the worst of it. The version of Adobe Camera Raw you get with Elements 2025 is a drastically cut-down version of the one you get with Photoshop. It can do basic color and tonal adjustments, but that’s it.

If you even get that far. Bizarrely, Adobe Camera Raw is not part of the standard installation, so that initially at least, none of your RAW files will show up in the Organizer and Elements won’t be able to open them. In fact, you have to download and install Adobe Camera Raw separately via the Help menu. But Adobe doesn’t tell you this. Extraordinary.

Photoshop Elements 2025 verdict

Photoshop Elements 2025 reminds me of a giant family noticeboard that’s been hanging in the kitchen for years. Its whole surface is covered in gaudy Post-it notes, and every year there are a few more stuck on top of the ones that are already there.

It’s like one of those old-fashioned point-and-shoot cameras which are fully automatic but have dozens of ‘scene modes’ for every possible contingency AND both Auto and Full Auto modes. That’s great as a more-more-more marketing pitch but the absolute enemy of simplicity.

I don’t dislike Elements 2025 because of the audience it’s aimed at or some of its more cheesy effects. Who am I to dictate what people should and shouldn’t like? I dislike it because it’s a very old product with a very old way of working that’s being kept alive by marketing (a bit strong, but you know what I mean). It’s full of inconsistencies, duplications, omissions and glitches that would irritate an expert and – I think – confuse the heck out of many novices.

I also don’t like the new three-year license deal. I haven’t heard of fixed term one-off license deals before, and it looks to me like Adobe has invented a new and rather cynical sales cycle.

If you want a cheap Photoshop alternative, get Affinity Photo 2. If you want to create modern social media graphics, memes, posters and other artwork, use Adobe Express. Elements 2025 just belongs to another era.