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Photoshop Elements 6 (PC) | 
| From: Adobe Systems Inc.
Category: Software
List Price: £78.02
Buy New: £37.00
You Save: £41.02 (53%)
Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 12
Platforms: Windows Xp, Windows Vista
Media: CD-ROM
Operating System: Windows Vista
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 8 x 2.1
MPN: 29230709
EAN: 5051254220022
ASIN: B000VZEIOS
Release Date: October 2, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW FULL VERSION. SEALED IN DVD BOX WITH UNUSED & UNIQUE CODE. BUY WITH CONFIDENCE. DELIVERED IN 1-2 DAYS.
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Product Description
Easily tell great stories with your photos. Powerful yet easy-to-use Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 software helps you make your photos look their best with step-by-step editing assistance and amazing compositing capabilities. Share your stories in imagin -
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Ideal digital photo tool November 18, 2007
Michael Shea (Essex, UK)
201 out of 204 found this review helpful
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.
If you can't afford Photoshop Extended this is one of the best choices for image editing and photo storage October 15, 2007
Keith Joseph (West Berkshire, England)
358 out of 365 found this review helpful
Presently on PcPro's `A-List', this is a cut down version of Adobe's 500+ Photoshop/Photoshop Extended CS3, and costs considerably less while still having a lot of useful photo editing capabilities. Photoshop CS3 has a steep learning curve, but not so Photoshop elements. Elements is far more home-user friendly and a lot of the program is geared towards image storage and management of the photos on your hard drive. It also helps you with emailing, web output and scrapbooks of your images. The program auto-downloads your images from the camera to folders, set up using the date, and can process the images, automatically removing red-eye, while it does it. Using stacks you can set up image databases [smart albums] using keywords like names, places, events, etc.., and you can even search using visual tags within the image. That said, I shun the image database options offered by Photoshop Elements and Extended, prefering the simplicity of logical folder names instead.
PhotoShop Elements 6 now looks good with it's graphite-colour interface. For editing you have a set of quickfix tools or you can load the full image editor for greater manual control: such as adjust sharpness, correct camera distortion, levels, hue and skin colour. Naturally you have standard tools like crop and adjust image size (pixels) as well. With Elements v6.0 you can now do things like brush away wrinkles with the spot healing/healing brush, use clone overlays, make improved B&W images, add image vibrance and clarity, make composite pictures, copy and even blend parts from different images (to say swap faces from a series of photo's so that all your kids are smiling at the camera in one image). You also get a layers palette for composites, shapes, text effects and frames. Plus there are step-through guides [guided edit] to help you get there. Some Adobe Elements on-line help is as obtuse as ever, but Elements simplicity makes this far less of a problem than with the full Photoshop [also see help.adobe.com, photoshopelementsuser.com & adobe.com].
The software will also integrate with scanners twain interfaces if you are into scanning film, and the Fill Light [shadow/highlight] tool is pretty essential for bringing out detail in shadows from any slide/negative scan. Plus Elements can handle RAW camera images, although I use TIFF (Elements can save in any common image format). If you want something a bit more like old Photoshop 7 have a look at Serif PhotoPlus 11.0 as it's great value with cheap upgrades, and runs on anything from Windows 98SE to XP - plus it takes Photoshop plug-ins. There's also limited but freebie Google Picasso and Corel's excellent Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 to consider. Otherwise Elements is a great bit of image editing/database software from the main player in the market (Adobe). It's well worth upgrading from older versions of Elements that may be bundled in with cameras & scanners. See Adobe.com for upgrade details, it's often 10 cheaper to upgrade rather than buy the full licence, unless Amazon is offering it discounted on the day. The only downside with Elements 6 is that it's XP/Vista only. If you have an older PC OS or a tight budget try ebay/Amazon rellers for older versions of Elements that will be going cheap - v5 is XP/Vista, v4 or v3 is XP/2000 and v2 is NT, 98, ME, XP, 2000. As with any editing software, a lot of memory (2Gb) and a fast processor really speeds things up with large photos but a modest processor (1.3GHz + 256 RAM) will work OK with v6.0 if you are a rather patient sort - and have XP. Don't go below this minimum system requirement for v6.0 though - Adobe installers often reject any PC that falls below their minimum specification.
So, overall Photoshop Elements 6 a great bit of software, although perhaps it's not a crucial upgrade from Elements 5. However, those also into video and PC video editing should seriously consider the sister program Adobe Premiere Elements that does the same for Video - and more importantly you can buy these two as a twin pack at reduced cost (checkout adobe.com and Amazon). If you think your school age kids (primary school-kid to university student) would benefit from this Photoshop Elements 6.0 & Premiere Elements 4.0 twin pack you can get them a home-use only licenced Student copy for under 80 (see Adobe.com). Similar Educational discounts apply to all Adobe products (e.g. Photoshop Extended and Creative Suites).
Great package and a try before buy is available February 21, 2008
Simon Draper (UK)
80 out of 81 found this review helpful
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 October 19, 2007
A Common Reader (Sussex, England)
230 out of 235 found this review helpful
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.
Photoshop Elements 6 February 12, 2008
J. Thomas
38 out of 40 found this review helpful
I had my doubts about up grading from Elements 5 to Elements 6 , I have now done so and I have no regrets. Ifind the new software easier to ue and the new clone overlay tool is an easy way to clone acurately. I have also signed for the Photoshop newsletter, which so far has been an invaluable learning resource.
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