Monday, November 29, 2010

Photoshop Elements 9

A few years ago I got Photoshop Elements 6 and have been mostly using it since the ACR with it can open my A700 raw files, whereas my Photoshop CS2 cannot. I generally like it a lot, but it has many very annoying and frankly hard to believe GUI bugs that even the simplest freeware programs don't have. The bugs exist when run on WinXP, Vista, and Win7 64. I would have updated to PSE 7 or a later version if I thought those bugs were fixed. I asked about that a couple of years ago somewhere, I think on the Adobe forum, and was told the problems in a later version still existed and someone else reported that the Mac version was also very buggy.

Now that I have the Canon 60D the ACR 5.6 that works with PSE 6 can't open the 60D raw files so last night I decided to download the trial version of the new PSE 9/ACR 6.2 that was released fairly recently. Good news! It seems like all the GUI bugs have been fixed! I used it last night and then some more today and so far I haven't found any problems. I just use the editor and don't use the organizer so I can't comment on that. I see that everything looks about the same as PSE 6, but there are some new tools and functions that I will have to investigate.

Since I use it to prepare files for the web it isn't that important to me that some of the Photoshop stuff isn't in Photoshop Elements. It does work with my Neat Image and PTLens plugins though and that is important to me. If I was routinely making big prints or publishing photos in print then probably full Photoshop would be better.

I ordered PSE 9 from Amazon a few minutes ago. Good price, $66 for DVD, free shipping and no tax. Also, right now there is an additional $20 rebate so price is $46.

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