[Dorian Gray]

I'm thinking of buying Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac, now that it's finally available. I'm in France and would rather avoid any potential hassle resulting from buying a product with a British credit card, registered to a British address, and shipping it to who-knows-where. It also seems like a good idea to effectively transfer the responsibility of looking after a permanent copy of the software to Adobe, leaving me free of the [admittedly minor] worry of making sure I don't lose the DVD in my peripatetic existence.

Am I overlooking any downside to downloading the software rather than buying a DVD? I've always previously opted for a physical product. In fact, I'm so old-fashioned I've never even bought music in a download format.

Unfortunately Adobe don't seem to have a trial version of this software available, so I'm sort of leaping in the dark regardless of which purchasing method I choose. But from what I've seen in online comments, Elements 6 should be a meaningful upgrade from Elements 2, which I currently still use. Shout soon if you think otherwise, before I pull the trigger.

[billybobsky]

I find the option of guaranteed lifetime downloads (if that is what adobe is offering) to be a highly useful feature of software purchased online...

i have used this option twice for software i have purchased without hassle...

[ghoti]

I would never rely on them keeping the software around for you forever, but it's easy enough to store the file on Amazon S3 or some other "cloud service", so you at least won't need to worry about losing your backup medium.

I've bought quite a bit of software online via download and never had a problem. I wish Adobe would figure out a way to let me download the software bought in their academic store, I don't know why they insist on sending me a box and a disc when I'm paying less ...

[Dorian Gray]

Thanks for your comments, gentlemen. I bought it, downloaded it (the 1.27 GB download took about 20 minutes), installed it, and ran it, all uneventfully. It did need significantly more than the 1 GB of disk space Adobe specify in their system requirements: more like 1.5 GB.

At first glance it looks nothing like Elements 2, so I guess this is the start of a rather steep learning curve. Speaking of curves, Elements 6 has something called Color Curves, which seems to be close enough to the real deal for me, and a nice upgrade-worthy feature from Elements 2. Perhaps I'll post my thoughts about the new software after exploring it more thoroughly.

And it launches in 5 seconds on my PowerBook! Elements 2 takes about a day.

[Wyatt]

I'd love to hear your impressions. I don't do a lot of photography/graphic work, so vanilla Photoshop is overkill (feature-wise and budget-wise) for me. I could probably justify Elements, though, if it's good enough.

I really only ever make minor color adjustments (curves, white/black points), crop and resize (although I usually use Skitch for those last two now). I like the history brush a lot, but I only use it rarely. Is there anything similar in Elements?

[Dorian Gray]

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, fcgriz. Elements 6 does not have the History Brush, but there appear to be several workaround methods that deliver similar results, though I haven't tried them myself so can't recommend any particular method. Generally, Photoshop Elements is a very comprehensive package that offers the great majority of CS3 features for a much more palatable price. Adobe pitch it as a tool for beginners and amateurs in an attempt to sell CS3 to more serious photographers, but Elements is very powerful indeed and would probably serve most serious photographers fine. In fact, I suspect it would be powerful and complicated enough to put off a lot of the very customers Adobe is targeting with their marketing, who would really be better served by iPhoto or similar.

Lightroom and Aperture offer a vastly improved workflow for a lot of serious photographers. But for as long as they don't offer layers, and they never will with their current user interface design, a version of Photoshop will remain necessary for some types of editing.

Incidentally, since I posted this thread Adobe has made available a free trial of Elements 6 for Mac. This is definitely worth checking out for anyone interested in what it can do.

I've found the new user interface a mixed blessing. I mostly like how it looks and works, but the way it takes over your entire screen is rather obnoxious. Elements 2 was a more Mac-like app in that regard.

Performance is markedly improved in some ways from Elements 2, but in others it seems the same after all these years. I did an identical Gaussian Blur on a large image in Elements 2 and 6, and it took exactly 3.7 seconds on both, for example (according to Photoshop's timer). Either Adobe's Gaussian Blur code is perfectly optimised or nobody's looked at it in years.

[babelfish]

Hmm I never previously seriously considered getting software online but these series of posts may have changed my mind!

Cheers.