Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 (Mac)

List Price: $89.99 Discount Price: $79.99

Features:

• Share photos online via your personal Kodak sharing page; via email; and in professional-quality Kodak prints, greeting cards, and photo stamps
• Easy-to-use software walks you through key steps so it's easier than ever to improve your photos and make unique creations
• Experiment with easy compositing tools that let you create perfect group photos and seamless panoramas, combine elements of different faces for entertaining results, and more
• Easily make adjustments to color, lighting, and exposure
• Brush away wrinkles and unwanted objects using the Spot Healing Brush for instant results and the Healing Brush for finer control

Customer Reviews:

Great Upgrade [Posted on 2008-04-06]
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.

Nice Value [Posted on 2008-04-13]
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.

Excellent App [Posted on 2008-04-14]
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!

very complicated to learn for a beginner [Posted on 2008-04-28]
I am sure this is a great program for experienced users, but for a beginner, even with help from Photoshop Elements 6 for mac: the Missing manual, its difficult to learn. But, i'll keep trying since I have invested quite a bit of money and time in it.

It says on the cover that it is compatible with Iphoto, but you have to do a work-around to accomplish that. When I purchased this I relied on that declaration. I thought I would be able to go directly into Elements from IPhoto. That is not so. The advertising is not truthful. I called Photoshop to get help and received it from a very patient person.

Adobe confusion [Posted on 2008-05-05]
I find the product too complicated. It would have been better without Bridges and less difficult to navigate. Get an earlier version of Adobe.

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