MARCH 2020 MACWORLD 27highly dependent upon lighting,
background, and other factors, but
PE2020 comes awfully close even on
challenging photos, at least reducing the
amount of time required to make
necessary adjustments. Auto selection
also makes possible two of the four new
Auto Creation tools to add faux depth of
field or convert backgrounds to black-and-
white, which helps make subjects in the
foreground stand out.
PATTERN PAINTING
Automatic selection also factors heavily into
Pattern Brush, another new Adobe
Photoshop Elements 2020 tool which
allows novice shutterbugs to spice up
images by painting with one of 15
decorative brushes. This guided edit walks
users step-by-step through the entire
process with a Protect
Subject option (enabled by
default) that restricts Pattern
Brush to the background
only, rather than apply it to
subjects in the foreground.
This works effortlessly,
although the patterns—
hearts, balloons, fireworks,
butterflies and the like—
tend to be a little on the
frilly side for our tastes.
One unique new feature
to really show off the power
of Adobe Sensei is Colorize Photo, which
does an amazing job of converting black-
and-white photos to color. It’s the modern
equivalent of colorization, which
transformed vintage Hollywood movies like
It’s A Wonderful Life to make catalog titles
more palatable for a new audience during
the 1980s home video boom.
Where colorization required
painstaking, time-intensive labor, Colorize
Photo requires little more than a single
mouse click. There are four variations to
choose from in automatic mode, or you
can switch to manual for additional control.
Keeping expectations in check, the results
are remarkable—colors aren’t vibrant or
photo-realistic but in our tests, the
software accurately colorized a red T-shirt
and brown building without knowing those
were correct, not to mention addingPowered by Adobe Sensei AI, Colorize Photo intelligently
colorizes even various shades of blue jeans in one click.