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(More customer reviews)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.
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