[.ca] Adobe Photoshop Elements 6

• Make your photos look their best with easy-to-use editing tools
• Do more with your photos in unique creations for print and web
• Easily find and view all your photos and video clips
• 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

Great product, but Adobe want to make quick buck!:
Had Photoshop Elements 5.0, which Adobe shipped with a printed User Guide. Wanted to buy 6.0, for which Adobe would charge $99.99 a couple of weeks ago, WITHOUT a printed User Guide. Bought version 6.0 at COSTCO for $79.99. Today COSTCO charge $69.99! Called Adobe about the User Guide. Yes, I can buy one at $50.00!! But sir, you can print it (PDF-file on their site). Total 464 pages! Wonder why double the number compared to User Guide for 5.0. Printing 464 pages will take a lot of ink, so what to do? Understand Adobe want to make money, but believe this is a bit too much!

Forget It:
I've used Elements 4 for a couple of years, enhanced with some third-party plug-ins - things like curves, software for lens distortion, sharpening, noise reduction - things that Adobe doesn't bother to include in any meaningful way with Elements. Still, Elements 4 had its good points. I up-graded to Elements 6 because it's supposed to support 16-bit editing. It doesn't. On top of that, it's far, far slower than 4. It claims that you need 256 MB, minimum, to run it, 512 MB recommended. Well, I've got 512 (no great shakes these days, I'll admit) and that ain't anywhere near enough. As soon as I tried to use the plug-in that would let me correct lens distortion, I got an "out of memory" error and everything ground to a halt. Funny - works just fine with 4. Basically, if you've got an earlier version of Elements, stick with it. That's certainly my plan. If you're looking to up-grade, well, give some thought to the Gimp. It's free, after all, and does pretty much everything Big Photoshop does. At least if you decide you don't like it, you haven't lost anything.

Not for old computers:
I had to upgrade my computer to install this program. But if you're a serious amateur photographer and not quite ready for photoshop, this is a great first step.