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Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac Arrived

Back in June, I wrote about the missing in action Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 for Mac, I complain and complain about Adobe not releasing updates compatible with Intel chips. The reason we needed Photoshop Elements to be a universal application is to gain some performance over the utilization of Rosetta to run Elements for PPC on our Intel Macs.

That was then and today is a different story, last week Adobe released Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac with some new features, new look and is a universal application that will work right whether you have a PPC or Intel Mac. I haven’t upgraded yet, my next purchase is Office 2008, but looking at the information found over Adobe’s site, I’m not too excited about it.

The first thing I do not like is the price, $89.99 USD for the full version and $69.99 USD for the upgrade seems a lot to me. While you can preorder now, there is no word on the download version, which was the way I bought version 4. To top this small details, whether you get into Adobe Elements site via PC or Mac the first thing you see is the PC version, shouldn’t they look out for this, you have to scroll down and select the “looking for Macintosh version?” link.

Adobe is smart about taking you straight to the new features to see if you can forget they change the user interface (UI) to what I call the kindergarten edition of Photoshop Elements. I know that if I want professional looks I should get a version of Photoshop CS but its ridiculous, it has more colors that a set of crayons. The dark gray environment reminds me of Adobe Lightroom, is not that bad but I hope there is an option to change that to a lighter tone.

Back to the UI for a second, the videos Adobe posted to show off the new Elements have the screen minimize, maximize, and close buttons that looks like the Windows one. This makes me think that this is no even the final version. The menus are in inside the screen as opposed to the regular Mac interface, what is Adobe up to, why would they show off screen shots of Windows software and advertise it for Mac.

About the new features, well they are all welcome, I’m impressed the group shot feature. Having the option to select multiple photos on a group and pick the best looking to build a perfect image is a killer feature. All the other features and just enhancements, you could do them with Elements 4, they just come to be easier for the novice user.

I think Adobe took too long to release this update, in the Apple campus Adobe now has more competition than ever. Programs like Pixelmator and Gimp, might get you to think twice before getting Elements 6 for Mac. Personally, I will wait to have more information to make my purchase decision. Share this post with your friends, subscribe to my feed if you haven’t yet, and thanks for reading.