Product Description

Easily tell great stories with your photos. Powerful yeteasy-to-use Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 software helps you make yourphotos look their best with step-by-step editing assistance andamazing compositing capabilities. Share your stories in imagina

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55 in Software
• Brand: Adobe Systems Inc.
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows Vista
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .66 pounds

Manufacturer's Description

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.

Customer Reviews

Ideal digital photo tool
I had the full version of Photoshop loaded on my last PC and it was thoroughly wasted on me. The majority of the features were unnecessary for photo adjustments and it took ages to open and close the program. I also did not like having a separate program running as a file browser. This made it slower and more cumbersome still.

In contrast, this fairly basic program is easy to use and apart from the shortage of ready-made picture frames, it enables you to transform photographs in all the ways I could think of. I have used the `guided' adjustments to very good effect. I invariably need to the alter the brightness of my photos and it's possible to apply this to the darker parts of the image only without ruining overall clarity. In the past, I've selected a darkish area of the picture manually and the transformation results have been fairly mediocre in comparison.

The worst aspect of the program is the fact that it does not recognise the old folders you've probably placed your files in. Instead, it puts all photos into one massive folder and then you need to apply tags to individual photos or make up whole new sets of folders. Rather than mess around with this, I've tended to sort all my pictures into date order and leave them in the folders I started with.

Thoroughly recommended. Its only rival for the money is Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, which is similarly good value for money; more labour-intensive, but easier to browse around.

Great package and a try before buy is available
While good to get you going, the photo and video packages often bundled with PCs etc really don't give you anything advanced and easy to use (I mean the budget editions that usually cost about £25 to buy separately).

So after deciding that I no way need the mega-functionality of professional packages (even if I could afford splashing out several hundred pounds!) I looked into reviews from a number of different sources on a couple of mid-range packages but the only way to really know is to try one out first before buying.

Adobe have a try-before-buy scheme for stuff like this on their website (the Pro versions and the Elements versions of PhotoShop and Premier are available) although the file downloads are naturally very big. It was after trying these that made me buy the Premier Elements 4.0 and Photoshop 6.0 bundle.

I spent pretty much a whole weekend with the trial version (which is fully featured with a 30day timeout) editing holiday photos and video clips trying out various features - they're really quite intuitive to use and (so far) I haven't had any of the crashes that others have experienced so for me it gets a thumbs up.

Surprisingly, ordering from Amazon was a couple of pounds cheaper than buying the unlock codes direct from Adobe and also gets you the installation DVD and manuals. Note though that you have to uninstall the downloaded time-limited version and then reinstall from the disk as the licence codes with the disk won't unlock the downloaded time-limited version.

Probably the best . . . and now better still
If you're serious about digital photography and want to do more than just the basic photo-editing provided with your camera then this is the program for you. Its big brother, Adobe Photoshop, sets the standard for image manipulation, but I am sure that the vast majority of users will be more than satisfied with Photoshop Elements, providing as it does additional functions and a more friendly interface for the digital photographer. The program is so easy to use that most users will be lulled into just using the standard fixes rather than exploring the huge number of additional tools for serious image manipulation. However, it is good to know that they are there should you have the time and inclination to explore them, and its well worth while getting hold of one of the many illustrated Elements books to help you with these.

Although it is a hugely capable program, Elements 6 also makes life easy for the beginner with its many quick fix functions and its guided edit process (new in this version). In addition, it really does have one of the best photo-organising album functions, enabling you to manage and organise thousands of photographs by a system of tags and albums, plus some very advanced photo search options - the new "find faces" feature is quite incredible and allows you for example to search through a set of holiday photographs and find all those which feature the faces of your family and friends.

The program picks up photos from any digital camera without fuss and red eye removal can be set to work automatically before you even see your photo. Adobes best shot smart fix edit is only a click away from the main screen and will greatly improve any photograph.

In addition to those features I've mentioned above, this version also has added much improved selection tools, improved processing of RAW files (typically for those with SLR cameras), a useful clone overlay which lets you clone (copy) individual items in a photograph, better black and white conversion and many others. It also has a VISTA style look and feel, while still working fine with Windows XP.

As to whether its worth upgrading from earlier versions, well, the price is quite high for the number of new features, but it comes down to whether you want the latest version "because its there" or because you need it. I suspect the "need" factor is fairly low, but the programme certainly looks a lot better and is definitely a significant update. It all depends of how much you value having the latest version of your software against having the familiarity of the version you're used to.