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It took a couple of years -- as well as a few months of jealousy -- but the wait for the next version of Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) 
Photoshop Elements for the Mac 
is over: Adobe is now shipping version 6 for the Mac.
The last version of Photoshop Elements for the Mac was version 4, which means Adobe completely skipped over the Mac community when it came out with version 5. To make matters worse for Mac-loving photo fixers, the company shipped Elements 6 for Windows way back in September of 2007.
The wait was terrible, but it's hard to argue with the results.
Image Editing for Everyone
Adobe Photoshop Elements is a photo and image editing tool. It's packed with features; but nonetheless it's a stripped-down version of Photoshop CS3 -- and for the vast majority of consumers and prosumers, this is a good thing. It has much of the basic power but little of the complexity of its bigger cousin. Still, Elements far exceeds the editing capabilities of Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) own iPhoto application, which excels more at organization and utilization of photos.
Even so, iPhoto '08 will no doubt fill the needs for many consumers -- its editing tools are more powerful than in previous versions, and for light photo retouching, cropping, color correction, exposure adjusting and the like, it produces acceptable results for most consumers. It doesn't take long for prosumers, however, to ache for more manipulation, and that's where Adobe's Elements shines.
The Basics
Elements lets you cut, crop, correct, lasso, clone, blur, sponge and otherwise magically clean and snag portions of photos that you can manipulate to create collages, snips and stylized pieces of art. Elements comes with dozens of built-in effects that turn images into watercolor paintings, sketches, mosaics, ink outlines and more, including one effect that covers your subjects in a layer of plastic wrap.
The effects are all wonderfully cool, and they'll let you burn hours' worth of midnight oil as you attempt to morph pictures into art worthy of a frame and a spot on your living room wall.
Many of these editing features were available in previous versions of Elements, but Adobe has added several new upgrade-worthy features that are particularly compelling.
The Bridge
To find your photos, you can simply open them directly from Elements or by right-clicking on an image and selecting "Elements" as the application you want to use to open the file. Alternately, you can set your application preferences to always open .jpg files, for example, with Elements.
There's a much better way, however, and that's to use the enhanced Bridge CS3 helper application. It basically lets you browse through your hard drive to locate the photos you want to open and manipulate. It's fairly intuitive, and it lets you quickly export photos from iPhoto -- with iPhoto open, all you have to do is select a photo located in iPhoto then drag and drop it into a folder in Bridge. From there, a double-click will open it in Elements.
One note: This creates a new copy of the photo, which means it doesn't mess directly with the photo that's already stored in iPhoto. After you manipulate the photo to your liking, you'll have to import it into iPhoto if that's where you want to keep it.
Of course, you can bypass iPhoto altogether if you so desire. There's a feature in Bridge, for example, called "Stacks" that lets you organize your photos into handy stacks of images.
All Together Now, Say 'Cheese'
If there's a single consistent problem that plagues family portraits and group shots, it's getting everyone to look at the camera, smile at the same time and keep their eyes open. Elements has a new feature called "Photomerge Group Shot" that lets you combine the best heads -- or even just open eyes -- from multiple photos in a group shot to create an image where everyone is smiling at the same time. It's a distortion of reality, of course, but it's also a distortion that's more of a pleasant little white lie than hard-core fraud.
Here's a perfect example. I shot a friend's wedding last fall, and I had a heckuva time getting the groom's family to pay attention at the same time. I ended up shooting 20 rapid fire photos just to capture a single group shot worthy of putting into print.
With the Photomerge feature in Elements, I could have taken just a few shots and saved everyone a bit of hassle and worry by moving a head from one photo to another. This new feature is fast and produces astoundingly seamless results -- it's just a matter of following the instructions after you select the tool. The most important tip for great results is having several group shots from the same perspective and zoom, ideally shot from a tripod. If you shift your camera around, you'll have a tougher time getting great results, but if you stay reasonably still holding the camera by hand, you'll be surprised at how well this feature works.
The one concern I have is how well these merged photos will look if they're blown up and printed -- I didn't have a particularly good opportunity to test this, but based on the electronic versions, it's a pretty sweet bit of magic.
Guided Edit
Elements 6 ships with a new Guided Edit feature that asks you basic questions on the types of photo manipulation you'd like to do -- it ranges from the simple, like cropping a photo, to the more difficult, like adjusting lighting and exposure or removing a color cast.
This last one, removing a color cast, is particularly handy for digital photos that are shot indoors without a flash, which invariably turns the subjects somewhat yellow. If you have a white wall that's got a yellow cast to it, Guided Edit shows you how to use the Eyedropper tool to make the cast disappear.
Guided Edit is designed to help novices edit photos quickly and easily with little knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes. It's the kind of feature that might be overlooked by those upgrading from earlier versions, but for newbies, the feature will ease the learning curve.
Black and White Redux
iPhoto has a feature that lets you instantly convert a digital color photo to black and white, and while it's pretty darn good, I hadn't realized what I was missing until I started playing around with the new Black and White filter in Elements 6. For some photos, a default conversion to Black and White looks great; others look flat after a conversion. The key, it turns out, is manipulating subtle amounts of red, green and blue, as well as contrast, to create a variety of different effects. Professional photographers certainly know all about manipulating color in black and white images, but it'll be an eye-opening lesson for most everyone else.
The new Convert to Black and White tool gives you six different black and white presets, as well as sliders that let you manually adjust your base colors and contrast.
It's a safe bet that Elements 6 users are going to be printing a lot more black and white photos.
There's More
Adobe has added some other interesting new features. A new Adjust Color Curves feature will help a user bring out truer color and contrast that enhance photos and keep them looking natural. For indoor or urban shots of objects with straight lines, Elements 6 can correct the slight camera lens distortion that can arise from the curvature of the lens. The curvature tends to makes an image of what should be a straight line seem to bend. Similarly, Adobe also threw in a new method for adjusting lens blur around the edges of an image. Of course, many consumers probably won't notice or worry about these issues, but having easy fixes is always a welcome addition.
Elements 6 also lets you create new photo layouts, collages, photo books and slide shows using the Create and Share tabs in the application. These are certainly handy features but nothing that will make your jaw drop.
System Requirements
The base requirements for Elements 6 are fairly reasonable -- a PowerPC G4, G5 or Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.4.8 or later with a minimum of 512 MB of random access memory (1 GB recommended), 64 MB of video RAM, 1 GB of available hard disk space, DVD-ROM drive, and a 1,024 x 768 screen. The cost is US$69.99 if you're upgrading from a previous version and $89.99 for a simple purchase.
There was one issue that had me struggling, and that's how Elements 6 locks you into using the application on your desktop. Instead of floating freely and letting the user move it around, it takes up most of your desktop and gives you a built-in dark gray background to work against. While the dark gray background removes distractions and is downright elegant -- which I certainly appreciate -- I felt a little claustrophobic during the first few hours of use.
Let me explain: I have a MacBook with a large second external monitor connected with screen spanning enabled. This lets me use multiple applications at once and move them around my virtual desktop. Elements 6 appears to be locked into place -- you're either using the application right in front of you or it disappears from sight when you click on your desktop or another application. Through the Preferences controls, you can remove the workspace background, giving you greater access to your desktop, which helps to some degree. For example, I always run iPhoto on my larger monitor, while I use the MacBook screen for applications that are less real-estate hungry, like Mail. It may be possible to cut the anchors in Elements 6 to let me move it around to a second monitor, but I couldn't find a control that allows that.
Despite this minor bit of claustrophobia, I got used to it -- especially since I'll most likely find myself running iPhoto on my second screen and dragging and dropping the photos I want to edit into a folder using Bridge.
Overall, if you're the kind of user who gets stuck with iPhoto's built-in editing tools -- or recognizes the opportunity to create interesting effects -- it's hard to go wrong with Elements 6. The new Photomerge Group Shot and Black and White conversion features alone should make the cost of acquisition worth it for many users.
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