From here on in it’s plain sailing. The interface is user-friendly without being patronising – something of an elusive feat going by many other ‘user-friendly’ applications – with step by step guided tool palettes making jobs that I’ve spent years learning to do by hand both easily accessible and ludicrously easy. Okay, so doing things by hand gives you more control over the results and can cope with a larger variety of image types, but it’s nowhere near as quick, and PSE6 will definitely provide both a ‘wow’ factor and a sense of empowerment and achievement for the new user. It may even stop work colleagues asking me to touch up their holiday snaps.
As far as ‘missing’ elements go, there are less options for layer effects and blending modes than in PS, and higher functions such as actions and layer masks are absent altogether. But then, Josephine Bloggs isn’t going to miss them anyway.
As a matter of fact, there are features in Photoshop Elements 6 that
I
will miss when going back to using PS.
Photoshop Elements 6 is a re-engineered version of the most powerful tool in the business – like a production version of a championship rally car. At almost a tenth of the price of the standard Photoshop it’s affordable by just about everyone, and, when packaged with Premiere Elements, its movie editing cousin, is a bargain that shouldn’t be missed.
Hmm… perhaps Doner Kebab Lite could work after all…
Although written by the author of Helluva.co.uk, this review first appeared in ICT for Education magazine ,by Lima Publishing, and is reproduced with their kind permission.
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