macnn
03/28/2008, 8:05pm, EDT
Friday, March 28th
Part I: First Look: Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac
If you enjoy touching up and editing digital photographs, you can use the free iPhoto program that comes with every Mac. However, if you want to go beyond simple editing and create more sophisticated visual effects, your only other choice might be shelling out $649 for Photoshop CS3. Fortunately, there’s now an alternative in between. After years of neglect, Adobe has finally released a Macintosh version of Photoshop Elements 6 for $89.95.
The new Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac finally brings the program equal to features that were previously only available in the Windows version. More importantly, this is the first version of the program that is a Universal Binary, able to run natively on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.
The User Interface
Since Photoshop Elements is meant for novices and intermediate users, the program offers a redesigned user interface. Besides the traditional pull-down menus and toolbox icons, the program also sports a three-tab interface that provides quick access to three common tasks: Edit, Create, and Share.
Each tab contains additional tabs to isolate different program features. For example, the Edit tab offers Full, Quick, and Guided tabs. The Full tab allows you to choose a visual style to apply to your pictures, the Quick tab provides various sliders for adjusting the lighting, colors, and contrast, and the Guided tab displays plain-English questions to guide you into choosing the feature you need.
The Create tab contains Projects and Artwork tabs to help you create a photobook or PDF slide show, as well as unique background images that you can modify.
The Share tab provides one-click access for sharing your pictures with others through a webpage, email attachment, an online ordering service, or burning to a CD/DVD. The combination of the Edit, Create, and Share tabs allows you to use the program without wrestling with multiple commands chosen from pull-down menus.
Filed under: software, digital imaging, Graphics/Web Design
Other story tags: Adobe, Photoshop
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It also shows samples of fonts in the font selection tool, which is something I've wanted for years.
It's not much faster than Elements 3: I have a Mac Mini Core Duo 2.0 GHz with 2 GB of RAM, so Elements 3 ran through Rosetta: Elements 6 is native. I did notice that when Elements 6 starts up, it loads a "Core PPC" library. Oh well. At least it's not a step backwards.
At last, Elements has a decent dock icon.
To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from Elements 6. Adobe applications tend to me lumbering monoliths with poorly organised user interfaces. But this version is a definite improvement over Elements 3. It's a tiny bit faster and is nicer to use because it has a better interface.
If you're not keen to cough up $70 and choke back the 1.3 GB download, you could probably get it bundled for free with some useful bit of hardware in a few months, such as a Watcom tablet.