Customer Reviews

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 - Old Version

5 star:		(133)
4 star:		(69)
3 star:		(36)
2 star:		(24)
1 star:		(47)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

I've used all 6 versions of Photoshop Elements, recommending previous versions to friends, and version 6 is by far the buggiest. The Organizer (the part that organizes all your photos) is riddled with bugs, some minor, some major, indicating a major lapse on Adobe's part. While 6 performs a little better than 5 for me (with 12K photos), and some people with larger catalogs says it performs much better, the bugs and new features barely justified the upgrade cost for me.

I'd recommend reviewing the problems people are having at Adobe's user forums ([...]) and testing the free trial available from Adobe before committing your money, especially if you're upgrading from a previous version. Beware that Adobe almost never releases patch releases of Elements - they release one version each fall.

Here are the bugs that I've personally encountered:

Major Problems:

* Even when Help installs correctly, it is missing more than half its content, and the manual isn't in the online download or on the CD. (How is one supposed to know that much of the Help content is missing?)
* The menu bars don't display if you have changed the screen DPI to be larger than 96 (as many people do on today's ubiquitous high-res displays).
* The grey-on-black user interface can be completely unreadable or hard to read on many uncalibrated displays (e.g. the typical consumer display) and can be hard to read by older people with aging eyes (distinguishing dark is a known problem of aging, and middle-aged people like myself appear to be a primary target demographic for PSE).
* The File > Move command will silently and permanently lose a file if the destination folder has a file of the same name as the file being moved; this is different behavior than PSE 5.
* The File > Move command loses the association between the photo and the audio caption, even though it moves both files to the new location.
* On a multiprocessor, the Organizer behaves erratically with catalogs containing raw files: sometimes it crashes, sometimes it shows the hourglass icon for raw files, sometimes it shows the broken-image icon.
* In a catalog with large numbers of raw files, scrolling quickly over dozens or hundreds of large-sized thumbnails will consume 100% CPU for a minute or longer.
* Tag hierarchies with more than 500 or so tags make the Keywords pane unusably slow (but worked fine in PSE 5).
* Moving map locations always fails, silently (too bad if you want to record backcountry locations not namable via Yahoo Maps).
* Giving a map location to a tag assigned to hundreds of photos makes both the Keywords pane and the Map View unusably slow.
* Removing the map push-pin of a tag assigned to hundreds of photos mistakenly tries to update the metadata of each photo, which can take tens of minutes and fill up your recycle bin.
* If a photo with GPS coordinates is imported, it doesn't show as a red push-pin on the map.
* New dates set by Edit > Adjust Date and Time sometimes get silently lost.
* The Photo Downloader process APDProxy.exe crashes at startup because of a missing DLL.
* File > Write Keyword Tags and Properties fails to update the metadata of TIFFs produced by Nikon Coolscan V, Nikon Coolscan 5000, and Epson 4490 scanners.
* File > Write Keyword Tags doesn't write the map location (GPS coordinates) into the .xmp sidecar files of Nikon D80 or Canon G9 raw photos.
* The File > Write Keyword Tags command doesn't report any errors in writing the metadata back to the photo (e.g. unsupported file types, readonly files, corrupt EXIF data).
* The Organizer fails very ungracefully when two drives have the same volume serial number, e.g. because of the use of a disk-cloning utility.
* The duration of a video clip included in a Slide Show is set to the default duration, not the length of the video clip, and right-click Edit Duration doesn't change the clip's duration.
* An audio caption attached to a photo isn't imported into a slide show even though the option Include Audio Captions as Narration is selected.

Searching and Dates/Times:

* The timeline doesn't correctly display date ranges spanning many years.
* You can no longer exclude a parent category from a search, e.g. exclude all photos tagged with any tag in the People category.
* Find > By History > Imported On sorts the photo dates alphabetically, rather than by date/time, making the command almost useless, and it shows a scary message "Deleting Keyword Tags" for catalogs converted from version 5.
* Setting a date range and then excluding two tags from the search clears the date range.
* Show All doesn't clear a date range set by Find > Set Date Range (can be very confusing).
* Searching for "0 stars only" doesn't work for photos in a catalog converted from PSE 5.
* Save Search Criteria As Smart Album isn't available if a date range has been set but no other search criteria have been.
* Time "unknown" has two bugs: Editing a photo won't preserve time "unknown", and searching with date ranges doesn't properly handle "unknown".
* File > Write Keyword Tag And Properties sometimes fails silently to write the EXIF XMP Date Time Original tag to older .jpgs, even though several other tools are fully capable of doing so.
* Edit > Adjust Date and Time sets the wrong date/time for the EXIF:CreateDate field of JPEGs produced by an Olympus C50-Z.

Minor Bugs:

* If a hard drive containing photos in the catalog gets its drive letter reassigned by Windows, then the left-hand folder pane of Display > Folder Location view shows the old drive letter, not the new one, as containing the photos.
* The File > Rename command no longer includes leading zeroes, causing the renamed files to sort incorrectly in Windows Explorer.
* In File > Export, the Common Basename can no longer be empty, and a hyphen is added automatically, so you can no longer get files named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, etc.
* Setting the Apply Metadata > Author or Copyright fields or the option Preserve Current Filename In XMP of the advanced options of the Photo Downloader causes duplicate files to be downloaded and imported.
* Display > Import Batch shows the wrong time for batches imported by the Photo Downloader; if the local time zone is UTC-8:00, then the time will be 8 hours earlier. Also, dates are shown as 2\20\2008 rather than 2/20/2008.
* With the Import EXIF Caption option turned off, captions pre-existing in a file's EXIF:ImageDescription metadata field reappear in the Organizer after invoking the Full Editor.
* In the full Editor's Red Eye Removal Tool, the Darken Amount is reversed: 1% produces the most darkening, 100% the least.
* Nudging with the arrow keys in the Editor stops working after applying a layer style, until you type Ctrl-T (Free Transform).
* The width of the Editor's Palette Bin can't be adjusted by dragging the left edge, as you can with all the other similar panes (Project Bin, Organizer Bin, Map View).
* Dialogs in the Editor sometimes bounce back when you try to move them.
* On a 1280x1024 display, the Editor Print window is positioned to perfectly obscure the scroll bar of the drop-down list of printer profiles, leading people to think their printer's profiles aren't available.
* If there are more lines than can be displayed in the Note field of a keyword tag, it is impossible to show the last line, though you can select it with Ctrl-A (select all).
* Copying a paragraph from Microsoft Word and pasting it into the Notes field of a keyword tag causes some of the spaces between words to be deleted.
* The scroll bars in the Organizer Full Screen view don't work correctly - clicking on the scroll bar arrows or the space between the arrows and the center box of the bar does nothing, unlike a standard Windows scroll bar.
* Escape doesn't close the full-screen-mode Properties dialog.
* Control-A to select all text doesn't work in the text fields of the Properties dialog.
* You can't use the Windows Explorer Tile command to tile the PSE Organizer and Editor windows.
* The Editor window can't be resized the standard Windows way by grabbing any edge, just the lower-right corner.
* Alt doesn't underline the shortcut letters of top-level menu items in the Full Editor (but it does in the Organizer).
* In the full Editor, if at least one open photo is minimized to the Project Bin, Ctrl-Tab no longer cycles through the open windows.
* In Create > Slide Show > Slide Show Preferences dialog, you can't use backspace or delete to clear the text in the Static and Transition Duration fields -- you need to select the text and then type over the selection (non-standard Windows behavior).

I didn't give it 5 stars because I know it's not perfect. But with that said, I love the program. After using trial versions of several image-editing programs, I decided on Elements 6.0 because I will eventually purchase Photoshop Lightroom and thought they would integrate well together. I also didn't want to pay the price for Photoshop CS3. I am still learning Elements, but so far I have not been disappointed.

The program works flawlessly--no glitches, hangs, crashes, or bugs. I'm running it on my 2-year-old laptop, which has Windows XP SP2, Intel Celeron M processor (1.5 GHz), and 2 GB RAM. (I don't know what my video card is; whatever came with the computer.) I would have to agree with another reviewer who said that any problems people experience with Elements 6.0 is most likely due to insufficient RAM and processor speed.

I highly recommend this program, and I look forward to learning more of its nuances.

I have used many so called graphics programs over the years, from Highly complex to simple. I am now at the point where I want functionality but not at the expense of simplicity. This product may have many features but they are not readily available nor explained very well. The only way you will know what it is capable of is by digging. Do a search for Photomerge, (which is mentioned many times) and get nothing. No written manual - online everything and very little explanation (or clear explanation, you can purchase some training if you like). It feels as though you are running multiple programs that are some how disjointed. I just did not feel that it was very intuitive and the controls were confusing - unless maybe you are a Photoshop junky - but this program is supposed to be for people who dont want all the confusion ! I just did not find it very user friendly. It may include everything but the kitchen sink - but it is not explained very well.

I have an Intel Quad CPU and an Nvidia 8800GTX OC w/over 700 meg of memory on the video card and 4 meg of on board Ram with Windows XP sp2 and a Dell 24" LCD monitor. - I found the program sluggish and just downright slow.

Corel Photo Album 6 by the way, is very fast and has a very good organizer with intuitive controls. Editing is lacking but sufficient for most tasks - Paintshop pro 11 does the rest if the Album cannot fix it. I believe Corel has Changed the name of the program with the album to Media Studio or something like that.

I have to say after using the product for a while and becoming familiar with it my opinion has changed. I highly recommend it.

I am figuring Elements out bit by bit - but it is not what I expected. I have had a couple of crazy things happen with thumbnails - do not remember exactly - thought it was just me - but may be a glitch.

I initially gave this program 1 star, because I could not get it to work on a Vista upgraded machine, nor on a different machine with a fresh install of Vista. Graphic Editing is extremely important to me, so I took the plunge and bought an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM and 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600 fast fresh Vista Machine and now it works great. The work flow between Quick Fix and Full Edit is smooth, and saves quite a bit of time. Integration with the Organizer is quick and usefull. I wish the Organizer had an explorer type of interface, but I am getting used to it. My old photoshop plugins work with the program, but some of the layer filtering features of the super Photoshop CS3 are missing, oh well.

Recently the program stopped working properly, so I did a clone of the computer to an earlier time when it worked, and now it works again. It is so important to me that this program works; I make a copy (clone) using Acronis 10 once or twice a day, in case PSE6 becomes unstable again.

I had asked Adobe about the program not running and they were confused and not helpful, asking lots of easy questions to me that were meaningless. I don't think they recognize the stability problems of the program working on slightly older upgraded Vista machines. But when it is working it is superb, so I have to give it 5 stars, it saves so much time. I have used it for hundreds of photos already, and the work flow is far superior to my previous methods, some which used Ulead products which now don't work on Vista. For 99% of my needs PSE6 is much faster than PE CS3, so I only use PE CS3 for more technical work. There are dozens of user friendly features that make editing a more natural and enjoyable experience.

The slate interface takes some getting used to after decades on white versions of photoshop, but now I prefer it, less tiring on the eyes. The handy sliders on Quik Edit are fabulous. The graphics are clearer and more vibrant than any earlier program provided. This is a program of the Future, and not the past. Don't try to use it on older machines. It can give you a reason to get that new Duo or Quad processor machine where installation is a breeze and it works almost all of the time.

Even after a tech support call, I am unable to upgrade my 5.0 picture catalog to this new version. I am using vista, other users using XP seem fine. In the adobe forums there are reports of a number of other problems. I am sure these will be cleared up, but you should wait a couple months before upgrading, especially if you have Vista.

If you have not used Photoshop Elements before, and you are just using folders to keep track of your photos, you should start tagging and backing up your photos asap. There are other tools out there, but overall I have been happy through the years with the Photoshop Elements organizer. I have over 30,000 photos and videos organized and tagged. I use the full version of photoshop for my imaging needs, but Elements has some great tools that are not even in the full version.

As a long-time user of PSE, currently version 3, I was very much looking forward to upgrading to this version. It looked great, and had a lot of great features. I downloaded the tryout version, which is exactly the same as the regular version...you just pay for a serial number.

At first, I was happy...I experienced none of the issues others found. I was able to successfully import all the photos and tags from version 3 into the new version. I imported new photos okay, and it automatically took care of red eye. I liked the fact that several of the most common functions, like cropping and red eye removal, are right in the Organizer now...no need to go to the editors to do that if you don't have to.

I went to try out the slide show feature. I added pans, fades from one photo to another, and a soundtrack...to 22 pictures. The interface was fairly easy to use, and the end result looked good. The problem came when I went to export it. The 2 main options are to PDF (then you lose all moving effects) or WMV file. I tried the latter several times...it kept stopping when it got to 98% complete. I tried taking out the soundtrack...still no luck. Couldn't find resolution on help forums.

Another thing I tried was to email 2 photos directly from the Organizer. Version 3 made it easy...just exported them to a file to attach to your email program. This version forces you to use an Adobe email system, which needs to send you an email to verify the connection. I received a code to enter on a screen....only thing was, when I received the code, I couldn't type it into the area where the code was required!

The 3rd bug I found was when trying to select all things matching one tag. I selected one tag, I found other photos not matching that tag come back, those with symbols that indicated "no match." It made no sense to me.

The upshot: I uninstalled version 6 and will not buy it...it doesn't work properly. I do not have Vista...I have Windows XP SP2. I would not recommend this version, based on my experiences and having read several of others. Too bad...I really wanted to use this.

I bought this when it was first introduced as an upgrade from PSE5. I installed it on a new HP computer with three gigs of RAM and about 360 available gigs of storage. It constantly locks up when scrolling through the organizer. Freezes on a regular basis. I am back to using PSE5 now because 6 is totally undependable. If you think I'm exagerating then I suggest you go to the photoshop elements users website and read the forums. There are many threads about people having grief with this software. PSE6 was clearly not tested as it should have been and is a money grab by Adobe for Christmas shopping suckers.