Adobe Systems has done it again: taken one of its best-of-breed software packages for professionals and created an inexpensive consumer version that will delight sophisticated users.

The new Adobe Premiere Elements at $99 (www.adobe.com/premiereelements) offers all the features a video hobbyist would want extracted from Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, which sells for $699.

San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe is perhaps best known for Photoshop, the software of choice for professional photo editing.

Photoshop isn’t easy to master, but is immensely rewarding for those who invest the time to learn the many amazing things the program can accomplish.

In making an inexpensive consumer version of Photoshop – the outstanding Photoshop Elements, first introduced in May 2001 – Adobe added a few features to help beginners, but refused to remove the most powerful tools from the original or dumb down the many technical terms related to photo editing.

Beyond the basics

Premiere Elements, too, also offers some hand-holding for beginners, but not much. If you only want to copy a few clips from your camcorder into your computer and burn them on a DVD, then the program is overkill.

If you want to make video productions that rival broadcast television, with artful transitions and music scores and perfectly positioned titles, Premiere Elements will do the job and more.

Just be prepared to conquer such audio and video terms as Continuous Bezier Interpolation, DeNoiser, Radial Gradient and Sixteen-Point Garbage Matte.

I’ve just spent several hours putting together two short projects with Premiere Elements, and I’m willing to keep climbing the program’s steep learning curve.

Unlike entry-level consumer video-editing software, Premiere Elements offers a solution to just about every problem. One example: I’d shot a few minutes of my 4-year-old daughter Sara singing in our kitchen.

The kitchen’s florescent lights turned Sara a jaundiced yellow. I found a tool called Auto Color that instantly transformed the entire clip to natural colors.

What you need to run it

Premiere Elements, announced on Sept. 15 and just now reaching store shelves, also expects a lot from your computer. Available only for Windows, you’ll need Windows XP with the Service Pack 1 upgrade, at least 256 megabytes of RAM and 1.2 gigabytes of hard-disk space just to install the program. Video clips take up huge amounts of space, so you shouldn’t attempt putting together anything beyond a two- or three-minute project unless you have 20 GB or more available on your hard disk.

Also, by the end of October, Adobe is promising the new Photoshop Elements 3.0 at $99, with considerable upgrades from the 2-year-old Photoshop Elements 2.0.

Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements 3.0 will also be sold together in a single box for $149. (All prices are before any discounts or rebates, which are almost always offered.)

Photoshop Elements 3.0 has impressive new tools for fixing photos, as well as all the features for organizing and sharing pictures that previously required buying a separate $49 program called Adobe Photoshop Album.

Premiere Elements, because of Adobe’s well-deserved reputation for quality products, is almost guaranteed to become a heavyweight in the crowded field of consumer video-editing software for Windows.

Macintosh users get Apple’s own iMovie and iDVD software, which is good enough that few competitors are still supporting the Mac.

The current market leader is Studio 9 at $79 and Studio 9 Plus at $99 from Pinnacle Systems (www.pinnaclesys.com) of Mountain View, Calif. I’ve used Studio in the past, and it’s a worthy rival for Premiere Elements. Among the smaller fish in the video ocean are Roxio’s VideoWave 7 (www.videowave.com), Sony’s Vegas Movie Studio (http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com) and Ulead’s VideoStudio 8 (www.ulead.com/vs).

Premiere Elements, like most of its competitors, is a full-service product covering all three parts of the process: Capture, where you pull video clips from your camcorder onto your computer’s hard drive; Edit, where you assemble the clips into a polished package; and Export, where you burn the finished presentation to DVD or send it back out to tape on the camcorder or make it into a compressed file for sharing by e-mail.

Even a small bit of video editing will give you new admiration for the people who put together movies and television shows. Beyond mastering the technical details, it’s not easy to shoot the right kind of scenes, and make the correct decisions on how to put those scenes together.

You might want to take your first steps in video-editing using whatever limited entry-level video-editing software is included with your computer. If nothing else, Windows XP comes with a basic Microsoft video-editing program called Windows Movie Maker.

But if you want to do more than hack together clips, I highly recommend Premiere Elements or Pinnacle Studio Plus. You’ll get software that can grow with your increasing expertise and interest. These are also the only two consumer video-editing programs supported by a significant number of “how-to” books, which can be a good way to learn at your own pace.