Adobe Photoshop Elements 2026 review: Weak RAW support and AI credits mar Adobe’s latest beginner-friendly offering

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2026 is the latest version of Adobe’s novice-friendly photo editor. It comes with Quick, Guided and Advanced modes to help beginners get started easily and learn more about editing at their own pace, together with a low-cost single license fee payment rather than an ongoing subscription.

Note, though, that Adobe has now imposed a 3-year license term – at the end of that period you will have to upgrade to a newer version. However, Photoshop Elements 2026 is available on its own or can be bought with Adobe Premiere Elements where it becomes better value thanks to a cost-saving bundle.

Major new features in Photoshop Elements 2026 include generative AI, both for full image generation and for generating new backgrounds, an AI photo restore feature and an enhanced Remove tool which can now select and remove people in backgrounds.

Photoshop Elements is regularly considered one of the best photo editing software choices, at least for beginners. Otherwise, Photoshop Elements 2026 will be instantly familiar to anyone who has used this software before. The new features are add-ons and the user experience is otherwise much the same. One question will be whether the new features justify upgrading; another will be whether Photoshop Elements 2026 is genuinely keeping up with the modern world or just trying to look like it is.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2026: Specifications

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2026: Price

Photoshop Elements 2026 costs $99.99 / £86.99 / AU$160, or $79.99 £70.99 / AU$127.99 if you’re upgrading from a previous version. Alternatively, you can buy the Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 2026 bundle for $149.99 / £130.49 / AU$241.99 (upgrade price $119.99 / £107.78 / AU$193.99) or $119.99 / £94.69 / AUS193.99 if you qualify for a Students & Teachers discount.

It’s certainly a lot cheaper than getting Adobe’s subscription-based Photography Plan, even when you take into account Elements’ 3-year subscription limitation. However, it’s also much older and more basic software that doesn’t really compare with Adobe’s modern subscription software for features, cloud storage and workflow fluency.

What about non-Adobe products? On1 Photo RAW is a much more capable and powerful tool for photographers and is available subscription-free too, though it lacks the projects and assets of Elements 2026. Canva Affinity is rather more technical, but as powerful as Photoshop and currently free. Photoshop Elements 2026 is decent value, but only if you definitely want its project-based approach and ready-made assets, and don’t care too much about its technical limitations.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2026: Design & Handling

Both Premiere Elements 2026 and Premiere Elements 2026 share the same Organizer app for managing, tagging and searching your files. You will need to switch to Detail view to see whether images are landscape or portrait format, and while you can double-click a JPEG to see a full-size preview, if you try that with a RAW file you’ll just get a blank screen. It seems the Organizer does not generate previews from RAW files.

When you open a RAW file from the Organizer, Photoshop Elements 2026 launches a (very) cut-down version of Adobe Camera Raw. You can adjust tones and colors but not much more, and it’s far more basic than the regular Adobe Camera Raw. In fact, this ACR implementation is simply to make your RAW files editable in the main editor.

There’s another thing to watch out for here, though. This version of ACR can output 16-bit files but the Elements Editor can’t do much with them. For guided edits, layers in the Advanced mode and other editing operations, you’ll need to switch the files down to 8-bit – which feels like a really old-fashioned limitation.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the editing modes. Quick mode is great for beginners because it comes with a range of Quick Actions for common tasks like dehazing a landscape, colorizing a black-and-white photo or applying a general smart fix. You can also carry out manual adjustments, apply a range of special effects and add textures and frames.

Guided mode is designed to walk you through a range of editing tasks manually. There are lots of these guided edits, all arranged into categories. They cover basic topics like cropping, resizing and object removal, through to more complex tasks like landscape improvement with dehazing and sky replacement. Some of the results from these guided edits can be quite crude, so you may need to touch them up with tools provided in the guided edit panel, or switch to the Advanced mode and do it there.

The blue sky replacement in the Perfect Landscape process is a good example. The sky can merge awkwardly with the foreground – it’s nowhere near as good as Photoshop’s equivalent – in the guided edit, but if you swap to the Advanced mode you’ll see the guided edit has created masked adjustment layers for the sky and the foreground that you may be able to improve on with some manual tweaks.

The advanced mode is like a mini-Photoshop in its layout, but with a really cut-down set of tools. You can only create a handful of different adjustment layer types, and there’s no curves adjustment or B&W conversion adjustment, for example. Incidentally, if the adjustment layer button is unresponsive, it’s because you’ve opened a RAW file as a 16-bit image and you’ll need to convert it to 8-bit.

You can apply a nice range of artistic effects, though, together with Photoshop-style filters and graphics, which include frame styles. These are confusing, though. You might drag one onto your photo thinking it will automatically frame it, but instead it creates a new layer group that’s not even the same size as your current photo and prompts you to choose a photo from your hard drive. There are many instances where Photoshop Elements 2026 feels like it’s been rather thrown together without a lot of thought or explanation, and this is one of them.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2026: Performance

The new generative AI features in Elements 2026 work well, using Adobe’s regular Firefly engine, presumably. Other AI features are a little less impressive. The AI photo restore cleans up some dust and scratches but appears to do little else, in stark contrast to ON1’s Restore AI, for example. You can colorize old photos too, but that’s a separate process.

The enhanced remove tool can indeed identify people in the background of your shots, but not necessarily all of them, so you may need to mask out any extras manually. It replaces them with surrounding detail which doesn’t always line up well.

The Depth Blur feature can work very well. It doesn’t have the same speed, fluidity and control of the Lightroom Lens Blur tool, but it’s not bad. The motion effects aren’t so good, though. They’re designed to animate parts of your still photos, but the selection tools are crude and the results variable.

The main performance limitation for photographers is the weak RAW support and 8-bit editing environment. If you shoot RAW, this is not the program for you. If you only shoot JPEGs, Photoshop Elements 2026 is a stronger proposition.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2026: Verdict

Adobe Photoshop Elements feels like an old photo-editing platform being kept alive by some headline-grabbing new features every time the annual upgrade comes around. It’s perhaps fine for ‘memory keepers’, school projects or anyone who just wants to mess about with photos, but it’s not a good tool for photographers.

Its basic RAW conversions and lack of support for 16-bit editing severely limit the results you can achieve, and are not helped by pretty basic tools even in Advanced mode. Really, this is not a program designed for photographers where the image is the end result, but for people who want to do things with their photos and aren’t really that bothered about finessing their quality.

Alternatives

ON1 Photo RAW is an all-in-one cataloguing, browsing, editing and effects tool that normally costs more than Photoshop Elements 2026 but is often on offer and actually cheaper. It doesn’t have Elements’ projects and assets, but it’s a much more powerful photo editor.

Affinity has been overhauled under the Canva banner, with the Photoshop alternative now entirely free to download and use. Only premium Canva AI features sit behind a paywall. When it comes to raw power, Affinity is as close as you’ll get to Adobe Photoshop’s classic and powerful layer-based editing. The catch is that it’s just as complicated to use. If you’re willing to put in the time, you’ll be richly rewarded, but if you just want to hit the ground running, Photoshop Elements 2026 is the better choice.