( 78 reviews )
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Posted: 08-16-2009
I am an artist. While teaching other courses at the college level, I took photoshop courses over in the commercial art department. I became quite good at using Photoshop and for some time used Photoshop over real life media in creating art work. After awhile I started getting bored with it and drifted back to real life media. However, I still needed a graphics program. I began using this program instead. After awhile, I liked this program better than Photoshop and found myself rarely opening Photoshop. It was so much easier to just open ELEMENTS and take advantage of the fact that Adobe knew how to fix some of the problems in photos faster than I did. Thus, the enhance choices on the menu bar were often all I needed to fix a picture. I could also use certain tools without taking extra steps because Adobe had thought ahead for me on what I probably wanted to do. Thus, with the move tool, I could just move parts of my picture around without even bothering making layers. ELEMENTS was also less taxing on my system's resources although I have 2 GB of RAM on the very latest Macbook. I could open ELEMENTS and have lots of other programs open as well and jump around from one to another. Photoshop is such a systems' hog that it could easily interfere with using other programs. There is a really easy way to hide ELEMENTS which I use all of the time so I can pop in and out of it at will. The keyboard shortcut is COMMAND KEY (aka APPLE KEY) plus CONTROL plus H. So 3 keys and it is completely hidden. Just click on the ELEMENTS icon on your dock and you've got it back. This way you can keep ELEMENTS open all the time. Another thing I do is that if I need to do something more complicated, I use open source, free GIMP, which has the features that are not on ELEMENTS but only on Photoshop. Because GIMP is also not a drain on my system resources, it is easy to keep both applications open. So if you are thinking that ELEMENTS is only for people not adept enough to use Photoshop, you are wrong. ELEMENTS is a very full featured program and can be very satisfying for a wide range of users.
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Posted: 08-15-2009
I was somewhat hesitant to purchase this because of some of the negative reviews from Mac users about problems installing it. I purchased it anyway and had no problems whatsoever during install, it just took a long time...be patient. It is somewhat of a daunting task to use a lot of the tools since the interface is a bit confusing. Just play with it and before you know it you will start getting the hang of it. It would be nice if the program came with links to video tutorials like iphoto, but oh well. This is a great program that works well with iphoto and I am sure I will learn a lot more as I continue experimenting with it. I have no idea what layers do but will soon find out.
