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New Features.

Although version 6 is not radically different to version 5, there are a few notable new features.

Photomerge has been expanded beyond panoramas to include groups of people or faces. The theory is that you can take a smiling face from one picture and place it seamlessly onto another.   In practice this was not that easy. Although you do have the options to place alignment points on eyes etc., these never seemed to correctly match my idea of a good match. It really doesn’t take much skill to put two pictures on top of each other (layers) and erase sections of one layer to reveal the other.

Photomerge helps you to place a face from one image into another

The Convert to B/W filter is excellent. This allows you to make adjustments to the Red, Green and Blue channels as well as contrast. There are some presets, which include portrait, landscape, infrared, just click on one and fine tune it if required. Producing dramatic looking Black and White images couldn’t be easier.

Take full control on your BW tones with the new Convert to BW filter

The Organiser is much the same as seen on previous versions, just tell the organiser to Get the files from a folder and it will generate thumbnail images of each image file, or video. Using a database of some 25,000 images, generating a catalogue took about 35 minutes. Scrolling through the thumbnails also became tiresome as I couldn’t seem to fine tune the scrolling speed, the images either flew by or crawled up line by line. Of course the best way to use the Organiser is to assign keywords and tags to images, and then you can perform your searches or locate files very quickly.

The Organiser is slow, especially if you have a large collection of images

Conclusion.

Adobe generally gets things right, I have been using every version of Photoshop since version 2 and have seen many exciting improvements. Photoshop Elements has also been getting better with each release. Whilst version 6 on the surface has a few more features, including an excellent Print dialogue panel, I am not so sure that it offers enough extra features over version 5 to make this a must have upgrade. There are a few nice enhancements, but there is also a lot of excess weight attached. The organiser seems to have the brakes applied, it’s so slow. The dark grey interface doesn’t do much to lift my spirit, in fact I turned my computer off feeling quite depressed. Perhaps I am expecting too much for £69.99. It is excellent value for money and will accomplish many advanced tasks without any major problems.

It’s not Photoshop CS3, but it can deliver outstanding results at a fraction of the cost. In my review of Elements 5, I said that it was not a major improvement over version 4. The same holds true for version 6. Perhaps Adobe have got the formula right and don’t need to add any more bells and whistles, but if they want people to upgrade then we would like to hear some more bells.

Highly Recommended

I liked.

The convert to B/W filter
Other filter enhancements
Extra Flash galleries
Price – especially the bundle with Premiere Elements 4

I didn’t like

Dark grey interface
Sluggish performance
Garish tool colours
Performance on Organiser

Price £69.99
Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Windows XP & Vista

Price £99.99
Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 & Adobe Premiere Elements 4 for Windows XP & Vista