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Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, due out mid-March, is touted as a large advancement over the previous version, Photoshop Elements 4. There are many new features, and the program as a whole has been further targeted at consumers, but overall, it doesn’t seem like enough has changed to call it an important release. This section of the Photoshop Elements 6 review will focus on the redesigned interface.

Looking at the demo videos on Adobe’s Photoshop Elements site, I was rather dismayed by what I saw. The color scheme seemed to be all grey, and it overall looked very oppressive. At the time, I was looking forward to Photoshop Elements 6 and hoped for the best, based upon rumors that the actual interface was different.

Installing Photoshop Elements 6 provided a small hint of what was to come. The setup window (below) showed colors, progress bars, and fonts exactly like those of Photoshop CS3.

Upon launch, I saw the Elements icon, very similar to the CS3 icons: A simple white camera icon on a gradient blue background. To differentiate it from the Pro CS3 line, Adobe has made the icon circular instead of square. The splash screen is also identical to Photoshop CS3 in almost all respects, except for its shape, which is also circular. Given these visual cues, I was fully expecting something that looked similar to CS3: black text and icons on white/grey backgrounds. Unfortunately, this was not at all true.

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The first impression of the interface of Adobe’s new product is “dark.” The color scheme they chose is light grey text on dark grey background, with garishly colored cartoonish icons sitting on the side. As an extra insult to the eyes, the “mode” tabs at the top are orange, purple, and green, not complimenting colors. This color scheme might have been acceptable at best had they also made the titlebars and background of windows a darker shade. They did re-do the scrollbars and scroll thumbs to match the dark interface, but they didn’t touch the titlebars, and the dark interface clashes horridly with the much lighter Leopard-style windows. All in all this makes for a very distracting experience.

It seems that Adobe was attempting to do twofold with this new design: make it more consumer friendly by adding different modes depending on skill level, and to drive more experienced users to CS3, their much costlier pro line of editing applications.

They did the driving away well, but in my tests they didn’t do as well on the “consumer-friendly” front. As far as the interface itself goes, ignoring the questionable color scheming, I have to say the Guided Edit mode is superb. It is perfect for the novice Photoshopper, though most of the features can be found in iPhoto (more about Guided Edit Mode in the next installment.) The quick edit mode, similarly, is great at what it does. But when full edit mode is selected, I see little to no improvement over previous versions of Elements. In fact, to look simply at edit mode, I wouldn’t say any improvement has been made at all. The interface remains the same from version 4, but is now dark and hard to navigate in. The low contrast color choices make layer selection a pain, and render most small text, which in Elements is quite a lot, pretty useless at a glance.

On the whole, interface-wise, Photoshop Elements 6 is worse off than Photoshop Elements 4. Most commands are still buried in the menus, and Photoshop isn’t very helpful at finding them. The Guided and Quick Edit modes are great, but they don’t offer much more than iPhoto.

The version that I tested also works very poorly with Exposé. When the hotkey is pressed, it’s luck of the draw whether or not the windows tile or not. More than half the time, they simply disappear. One thing that never disappears is the grey background, which Adobe has apprently rendered as it’s own window. Whenever Exposé is activated, a large grey square tiles on the screen, taking up valuable space that should be dedicated to the missing windows that didn’t tile.

Obviously, I’m not too happy with Elements’ new interface. If you are a semi-serious photo editor, I strongly recommend getting CS3. If you are running Tiger and are working fine with Photoshop Elements 4, I recommend keeping it that way. The only reasons that this is a must buy is if you have Leopard and cannot afford CS3, but must have Photoshop. The interface is by no means unusable, but it is definitely a step down from the previous version.

The review will continue with a review of the new “Guided Edit” modes and new features like “Photomerge.”