Customer Reviews

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac (OLD VERSION)

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

Adobe labels Photoshop Elements as a program for casual photographers. It's a lot more than that and always has been. iPhoto is fine for casual photography. Elements gives great photo editing capabilities that can carry the load for some heavy duty editing. It doesn't have all the features of the full CS3 Photoshop but Photoshop has always offered multiple ways of getting results. Elements offers enough capabilitiy there's little that I haven't found a way to achieve.

Of course, if you have multiple SLR bodies and a bag full of lenses you may not like the idea of having the non-pro program. I use Photoshop in my everyday web design work but have Elements on my home computer and am happy with the photo editing I can do with it.

I've been working with Photoshop Elements 6 for the last 5 days. There's a lot to like. Adobe has added some excellent features from the full version of Photoshop like Quick Selection and Refine Edge. The new Color Curves feature is welcome too. Element's PhotoMerge options are incredible making it drop dead simple to take the best parts of several group shots and seamlessly combine them to build one great photo. The addition of Smart Sharpen along with more control of Unsharp Mask gives excellent control of sharpening now.

The three editing modes are well thought out. Guided mode is new and I initially thought I wouldn't bother with it. I have years of Photoshop experience after all. Wrong. It can be useful for common editing situations. And it's a great introduction to editing for the newcomer to Elements. Quick mode is still helpful and of course, there's the regular editing mode that come close to the regular Photoshop way of doing things.

Elements is also faster, finally Intel processor native. It opens a lot faster and runs faster. And Adobe has included Bridge with Elements 6, the same version that comes with the full Photoshop package. If you're moving up from iPhoto to Photoshop Elements it's great to be able to not have to deal with iPhoto's strange filing system and maintain control over where pictures are stored. Bridge itself is probably worth the $89 that Elements costs. It's a great program in itself.

There are some warts though. The Photoshop Elements interface does not look like most Mac programs and takes over the screen. The installer seemed to take forever to do its job and added a whole lot of clip art junk that I don't want or need, over 2 gigabytes for the installation. It's not even immediately obvious when opening the installation disk how to install the program. (open the language folder).

I do suppose that if you want to use Elements to create your own greeting cards or make cute scrapbook pages you might like the clip art. If, like me, you just want a photo editor, it would be nice to be able to choose what to install and not have to fill the the hard drive with images that will never get used.

That said, though, Elements is a solid upgrade and will handle editing for most photographers and a great price.

I have only spent a few hours with this product, but from what I've already seen it is VASTLY improved over the old 4.0 version. Now that it is a universal binary, the app performs very well and is no longer something I dread to have to open.

Adobe even made some interesting Mac features such as allowing us to have our toolbars float instead of being fixed into a frame (as an option--you can still use the default settings however). While this isn't exactly how I would like to see the menu bars function, it is much closer to what I want and is a nice touch, showing that Adobe realizes that Mac users tend to want to see and use things a bit differently than PC users do, and that they care enough about us to accommodate our preferences. I really like how easy it is to get a description of any filter or effect from the included help since it does a good job of explaining just what it is doing to the image instead of you having to play with it for a while to understand it's behavior (a genuinely useful help tool, never thought I'd see the day). Another really cool feature is the ability to search for filters using a spotlight-like tool that will show where and in which menu the item you're looking for is. This feature is simply brilliant, and a welcomed addition.

There are many other improvements to this app, but I'm mostly impressed with how Adobe has taken the time, energy and resources to take advantage of some of the great features of OSX Leopard. Most software companies these days do lousy ports of their PC software without taking the time to understand the needs and preferences of the Mac community. I am grateful that Adobe "gets it" and hope to see them continue this trend in their Mac products into the future. Oh, and the value is unbeatable- I for one would have been willing to pay much more for this app. Thanks Adobe for a much needed and improved update!

I've been using a Mac for over four years and have always marveled at how easy it it to install software. That was until I had the misfortune of ordering PSE 6. The installation failed and then took hours to remove. I finally was able to manually copy the installation files and complete the install. Ironically, Adobe only provides support to registered users, and you have to install the product before you can register. I found the answer to the problem on a Mac support forum. This is without a doubt the worst Mac installation I have ever seen. It also installed a bunch of unwanted and/or obsolete Adobe products without asking.

I starting using the full version of Photoshop in the late 90s, mainly for my website. It was getting older and older, but I didn't have money to update it, so I tried Photoshop Elements 2. I was kind of shocked, it had absolutely everything I had ever used in the professional Photoshop, plus it had a lot more fun features, was much easier to use, and of course, very cheap (comparatively). I used Version 2 until the new Mac OS Leopard came out last year, at which point I found out that it was one of those few programs that wouldn't work any more in Leopard and Adobe wasn't offering any upgrades. I was kind of screwed, but when version 6 came out, I bought it. I'm not mad any more because Elements 6 is terrific and worth the money. I probably wouldn't have bought it and I'm so glad I did. I also bought the new version of Scott Kerby's Photoshop Elements book for Digital Photographers (I had #2). I highly recommend it.

The one thing I have always used Elements for is compressing photos for the web or for emailing. Definitely check that feature out if you haven't already.

I just got married and have spent the last weeks making amazing alterations in photos. I have put people who took photos into the shots they took. I took out wrinkles, fixed red eye, etc. In general I just made all the pictures look better, even the ones taken by professionals. And then when I was done, I used the batch function to compress hundreds of photos so they were all under one megabyte (I had some 35 meg shots in there!). All this stuff is so easy to do if you have the book. The thing I like about the book is that you don't have to really learn the program, you just go to the chapter that tells you what you want to do. It doesn't assume that you learned stuff in previous chapters.

Now that it is intel native it sure loads my pic waaay quicker!

My favorite Magic Extractor still uses the older interface but still works great.

I like the new interface - I can see my picture and work more easier than the white background....

There is a $20 upgrade coupon in the box so older users can get some $cratch back for upgrading...

Having owned PSE 6 for the Mac for over a month, I am still very disappointed with it compared with PSE 4. Time and again, I fall back on version 4 because I cannot get version 6 to do what I know it should be able to do. Among other disappointments, it has crashed several times for no apparent reason and will not open existing animated gifs, as PSE 4 does so easily. I would be happy to receive a refund on this product until (if ever) the bugs are worked out. To be sure, it has some new features that I like and that do work. For example, I find the backgrounds in "Content" are very useful to me. Overall, though, for someone who owns PSE 4 already, I would not recommend purchasing this product.

Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE) 6 is exactly what it says it is - a large portion of ordinary photoshop at a fraction of the price. I use PSE mostly for working up my photos and it seems to have all the tools and corrective measures that I need. A few words of warning - if you're planning on purchasing this DO NOT download a free 30-day trial of PSE6 from Adobe's website. I did so thinking that the product key which I received with this product would be functional for the free trial - well it isn't. I then tried to install from the PSE6 disc from Amazon - that doesn't work either. To complicate matters further, unlike most Mac software, PSE6 isn't packaged and so it is NOT easy to un-install (Even the read-me says not to drag the files into the trash). The only solution to un-installing the free trial of PSE6 so you can use your recently purchased version is to run the install from the disk image (.dmg file) that you installed the free trial from and to select it to uninstall. For some reason, the Adobe install utility (found in Applications/utilities/Adobe) does not work. In the end, it's a great piece of software but be sure not to use the free trial first.

Update (12/26/08):

After having used this product for a few more months, I have some additional comments/issues that I've found to be a little bit frustrating. First of all - I want to dispel the rumor that PSE 6 doesn't work with OS X 10.5 because that is completely inaccurate - I'm running a MacBook Pro with 10.5.6 and overall, PSE works just fine. Next, it seems that Adobe's updater process does not work on accounts that are secured with Mac's FileVault program (or at least updating the updater utility itself does not work under such accounts). To circumvent this just create another account which is not FileVault secured and use it to update the product. Next, regardless of FileVault status, the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) module never updates with the updater utility - you'll have to download the module yourself from Adobe's website and manually install it per their instructions. Aside from these slightly minor issues - the product works great and is very useful.

I cannot recommend this product due to these reasons:
- It takes over your entire primary screen with no option to resize.
- If you have a dual monitor setup like I have, there is no way to move the app to your second monitor
- Clicking on the desktop on the second monitor or in fact in any other application causes Elements to hide itself on the primary (this is awful behaviour for a desktop application)
- Use keyboard shortcuts to move around in Spaces... come back to the space with Elements.. and guess what, it has disappeared.

These may not sound like much, but when you're used to operating in multiple applications in multiple windows, this behaviour is extremely detrimental to productivity not to mention highly infuriating.

I use Photoshop CS3 for the heavy lifting but Elements 6 is excellent for the Macbook that I carry with me when I travel. I can download my RAW images and do the basic post processing and then if I need to do some more significant processing I can do that when I get home. The Universal version is very zippy on my 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo. Highly recommend for anyone who carries a laptop with them when they go shooting.

I'm fairly new to Photoshop, so I can't really say if it is better or worse than previous additions, but I'm enjoying it. It works well with iPhoto. I was afraid I would have to start all over with this as my main photo program, but instead I can keep my photos in iPhoto, and bring photos I want to work with to Photoshop for digital scrapbooking, correcting, etc.