Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 [OLD VERSION]

by Microsoft

Product Features

• Make your photos look their best with easy-to-use editing tools
• Do more with your photos in unique creations for print and web
• Easily find and view all your photos and video clips
• Easily perform more advanced retouching and enhancing thanks to easy image-selection tools, amazing compositing capabilities, and more
• Share your stories in imaginative photo books, scrapbook pages, slide shows, interactive web galleries, and more

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B000UKBIEC
• Item model number: 29230727
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 28, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (317 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #533 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #48 in Software > Graphics > Photo Editing

Product Description

Amazon.com

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 software combines power and simplicity so you can easily tell great stories with your photos. Make your photos look their best whatever your level of editing experience--a friendly new design and step-by-step editing assistance help get you started. Easily perform more advanced retouching and enhancing thanks to easy image-selection tools, amazing compositing capabilities, and more. Share your stories in imaginative photo books, scrapbook pages, slide shows, interactive web galleries, and more. And always find and view all your photos and video clips with ease.

Create the perfect group shot Never let a frown or a closed pair of eyes ruin a group photo again. New photo-blending technology lets you easily combine the best facial expressions and body language from a series of group shots to create a single, perfect composite.

Select and adjust specific areas of a photo more quickly and easily than ever before.

Easily organize stills and video clips with visual tagging options.

Bring out the best in your photos
Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 software combines power and simplicity so you can make your photos look their best, share them in imaginative ways, and easily find and view all your photos and video clips.

Make your photos look their best

• Experiment with easy-to-use compositing tools that let you create perfect group photos, seamless panoramas, and more.
• Easily brush away wrinkles and unwanted objects using the Spot Healing Brush for instant results and the Healing Brush for finer control. And now when using the Healing Brush, you can preview your changes prior to committing them to get the best results possible.
• Make image selections in seconds so you can easily adjust specific areas of a photo. Simply brush your selection, and then use sliders to make the adjustment blend perfectly with the background.
• Easily adjust skin tones for a more natural look, even in poorly lit photos.

Do more with your photos

• Get step-by-step assistance for making photo creations like scrapbook pages, cards, and CD/ DVD labels. Simply choose the type of creation you'd like to make, and the appropriate tools and instructions appear at your fingertips.
• Find inspiration in professionally designed, color-coordinated layouts that make it easy to make great photo creations in minutes. Or spend a little more time and customize all the elements of your chosen layout.
• Quickly create professional-looking photo books with flexible new options that allow you to view spreads, flip through your book, and rearrange pages--all with fewer clicks than ever before. When your book is finished, just click the Order button to have it professionally printed, hardbound, and delivered to your door.
• Create an eye-catching slide show complete with captions, documentary-style pan and zoom effects, amazing transitions, voice narration, and music. Or take things a step further and share photos in your choice of interactive web galleries.

Easily find and view all your photos and video clips

• With a single click, transfer photos from your memory card to your computer according to your preset preferences, so you can get back to taking photos sooner.
• Easily tag photos with keywords that represent people, places, or events. You can instantly view every photo you've ever taken of your dog, for example, by simply clicking on its tag.
• Place your family, work, or vacation photos into Albums to keep them together for special projects. And see just the photos you want to see with new Smart Albums, which automatically bring together photos based on criteria you choose.

Product Description

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 software combines power and simplicity so you can make your photos look their best, share them in imaginative ways, and easily find and view all your photos and video clips.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

431 of 436 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Big changes to Photoshop's best product December 4, 2007

By Joanna Daneman #1 HALL OF FAMETOP 10 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Platform for Display:PC

I'm a user of Photoshop Elements all the way back to the first edition. This is, in my opinion, one of the best graphics programs out there--all the power of the great Photoshop full professional program minus the printing CMYK functions you'd need to do professional layouts. So for most users, the great features of Photoshop are there and the price is oh-so-much-more-affordable.

The Version 6 has some significant changes. The interface looks quite different, though I only had some trouble finding my favorite functions. The loading is significantly faster than the previous versions, which was one of my chief annoyances with Photoshop Elements. Version 6.0 loads very quickly, and this is a big improvement.

Changes:
Smart Albums: built-in picture organization. No need to use a separate organizer program.

Darkened Interface: The picture interface (where you load your photos) is darkened to make a better contrast on screen. At first, I did not like this, but it is easier on the eyes so I got used to it and like it now.

Selections: With this new technology, you use a brush to mark out your selection, and then use sliders to make the adjustment blend into the background. Very easy to use. Major change.

Enhanced Clone Tool: Cloning lets you take an inocuous background selection and copy it over an offending area of a picture (mailbox, person, unwanted pole.)

Enhanced Spot Healing Brush: Very easy to use brush to haze out areas, I used to use the smear brush, this is easier and less difficult. The later versions of Elements have a check/cancel button in the corner of your work area, so you can back out of the changes without altering your work.

Enhanced Black and White: Contrast function built in to convert color to pretty decent b&w.

Photo Blending: Much better function to mix photos. Now you can create unrealistic pictures of yourself by putting in your best bits with someone else's better bits, post it on Match.com and disappoint people who meet you in the flesh.

Enhanced Photo Books: available only in North America and Japan. Kind of a way to make your own catalogs.

Enhanced Sharing: Sharing Center burns cds and sends to email as well.

Enhanced Interactive Sharing: Adobe Flash Technology is employed to make animated web galleries. Very cool.

Smart Albums: You can sort by 10 criteria, such as date of shoot, etc, and make an album of only those pictures to work on.

The computers that run Photoshop Elements 6.0? Right now, it's just PC's, and it supports both XP and Vista, though I've heard reports that Vista can be problematical. I do not use Vista, so I can't report on this.

MAC version is due out in early 2008.

For PC's, here's your system requirements:
1.3GHz, or better CPU
256 MB RAM (512 recommended, really)
16-bit Color display with 1024x768 resolution at 96DPI or less.
CD-Rom
1.5 GB hard disk space minimum available

I'd add that a good video card is advisable; if your system is more than 3 years old, it may bog down if you don't have enough video memory on board and I can't speak to what is required, as this is not given as a spec. If you find the processing of pictures slow on your system, adding more video memory may be more useful than more RAM on the main board.

320 of 329 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars If you have Photoshop Elements 5, no need to upgrade November 1, 2007

By Observer

Platform for Display:PC

I only use the Editor in Photoshop, never the Organizer, and my OS is Windows XP SP2. I started with PSE 4, then 5, and now 6, and have found this program to be extremely useful for improving, even renovating, my old slides and photos which I have scanned. But I am sorry to say that 6 does not seem to improve on 5. First of all, the Help button brings up no help at all. Tech support provided a workaround which is to use a shortcut to a file in Common Files. I must admit that the resulting Help file is much better than the Help file in 5. Secondly, the color scheme of the program, which cannot be changed, makes many of the buttons hard to read, especially for my aging eyes. In 5 the buttons were very clear. In 5, if you clicked on L, the shortcut for the Lasso Tool for example, an icon in the Options Bar will be highlighted to show which Lasso Tool you have activated, and the same for other shortcuts for multiple tools. That feature has been eliminated in Photoshop Elements 6 for no good reason.

In all fairness, PSE 6 is about 75% larger than 5, so it probably has some resources that I have not had occasion to use, and probably never will. Adobe's "What's New" for PSE 6 does not indicate anything really sensational in my opinion. My conclusion is that if you already have PSE 5, don't bother to upgrade now, and save your money for a future upgrade. But if you don't have any version of Photoshop Elements at all, then I would highly recommend Photoshop 6 which does offer an almost infinite number of ways to improve your photos.

93 of 94 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Photoshop Elements Keeps Getting Better! November 4, 2007

By J. Swickard

Platform for Display:PC

I can't advise on Vista compatibility, since I run XP. Also, it's a personal choice as to whether or not to upgrade from a previous version of Photoshop Elements. With these caveats out of the way, I'll say that Photoshop Elements 6 is the best version of Elements I've used and is a good improvement over Photoshop Elements 5 (which was a marginal improvement over Photoshop Elements 4). Since I teach Photoshop Elements on cruise ships I have to keep up with the latest version, and break it apart as I update and build new lessons. While versions 4 and 5 were great programs, Photoshop Elements 6 is an outstanding program. Just discussing the improvements in the Edit area: (1) Photomerge now has three features that work magnificently. Previously, Photomerge only had a Panorama. Adobe has drastically improved Photomerge Panorama and has added Photomerge Group Shot and Photomerge Faces to the menu. Photomerge Group Shot allows you to move people between photos (someone blinks or is looking the other way when a photo is taken) and works really well. Photomerge Faces lets you move facial features between photos (I'm still in trouble for putting a beard onto a photo of a friend's wife); (2) Quick Selection Tool, that replaced the previous Magic Selection Brush Tool, has become my favorite selection tool. It's fast and accurate, and a lot easier for new users to use than many of the other tools, such as the Magnetic Lasso Tool; (3) Clone Stamp Tool Overlay is a handy new option for use with the Clone Stamp Tool, and Elements has a Refine Edge Option that works well with the Quick Selection Tool, Lasso Tool, and Polygonal Lasso Tool. There are other improvements as well, and Adobe has retained the other useful features that worked well in Elements 4 & 5 (Straighten Tool and Magic Extractor to name just two). The one update in Elements 6 that I don't like is they removed the zoom in and out when scrolling the mouse wheel. My other critcism goes back to Elements 5 and is that to build and print a calender you have to send it off and pay for it. The one great feature in Elements 4 was that you could build calendars and print them out yourself (saving $20 per calendar), which is the one reason I'll also keep Elements 4 on my PC. Photoshop Elements 6 is well worth buying!