PSE 6 as an upgrade - first impressions.

[Codebreaker]

I downloaded the trial version of PSE6 just to see what it was like. Having played with it for about 5 minutes I'm naturally an expert...:rolleyes:

My first impressions are that it's not worth it as an upgrade even from PSE4. Mostly it's cosmetic and I admit I do like the new background colour but don't go a bundle on the new Icon colours. Apart from that there's nothing really new.

From Adobes perspective it couldn't have cost them much to re-jig the layout, so they've got themselves a 'New Product' on the cheap. Doesn't look like the listen to any of the Feature Requests.

One thing in the Editor that I can see irritating some folks - unless I've missed an option. The tools that have multiple choices e.g Marquee, used to display on the Option Bar the different choices. Now it seems they've gone back in time to clicking on the tiny little black arrow against the tool.

I didn't think I'd upgrade - now I know I wont.

Colin

[troush]

Colin,

I had a look too. You can right click on the tool buttons to also get the little flyout menu instead of just hitting the little black arrow.

The quick selection tool is mighty nice. I tried it, and it worked great.

Found a couple of bugs ;) One is if you open the editor, and then open the create tab, then open the organizer by choosing one of the options there, choose an photo from the organizer and choose "Full Edit", the full editor opens, except the right hand side still shows the "Create" menu. I ended up having to minimize the right hand side and re-open it to get my pallets back.

The other is "nudging" doesn't work after you apply a layer style. The work around is to do a ctrl-T to get the free transform tool, and then you can nudge.

I also played briefly with curves and b&w conversion. They took away the "click on this picture" part, and just left the sliders with more explanation.

I did a "quickie" scrapbook layout. If you drag up from the photo bin, it creates a frame. (This is how I work in PSE 5, so it's kind of a bummer - I only want to use a frame if I say so.) If you chose move and drag from photo to layout or from photo to photo bin, it works like the old way, but it doesn't put the file name in for the layer name. You can use File->Place to get the file name as the layer name.

I kind of like the new look and feel. The darker background was fine on my laptop LCD. I haven't installed on my desktop yet, to see if it's any different (I also have a 19 or 21 inch monitor for the desktop, so...)

-Trish

[graficalicus]

If you're coming from 4, I would recommend it just for the ability to unlock Curves & Channel Mixer (with an add-on) - if those things matter to you.

If you can find a version of 5 somewhere, I'd go for that - in addition to the unlockables above, you also can tap into Lab mode (which went *poof* in v6)

[Codebreaker]

Don't need either, really. :)

Colin