Thursday, April 3, 2008

Photoshop Elements 6

Jens Alfke:

Anyway, for a high-profile, award-winning app from one of the biggest software companies out there, the out-of-the-box experience for the new Elements is crappy. Really, it’s the worst I’ve seen in ages. So I had to write this post to complain about it, of course. And it got longer than I expected it to. And rantier.

I had a similar reaction when installing it yesterday. Chris Turner says it took more than 24 minutes to install it. I plan to do as much work as possible in Acorn and use Photoshop only when necessary, e.g. to convert images into small PNG or JPEG files.

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Any thoughts on using Photoshop for PNGs versus something like a combination of Acorn and pngcrush?

I use optipng rather than pngcrush—not sure what the difference is. My experience is that optipng helps in both cases, and that starting with a Photoshop PNG usually results in a smaller file (and never a larger one).

@Eric — Funny you should ask. My kids came to me, almost in tears, yesterday afternoon because Elements 6 wouldn't recognize the alpha channel in a PNG file they were opening. (See, it's a file of sprites from Sonic The Hedgehog, and they wanted to copy the characters and paste them into a background to make a sprite comic. But in Photoshop there's a blue background behind all the sprites, not transparent.)

They ended up opening the PNG in Acorn and copying and pasting into Photoshop. Yay.

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