Home > Consumer Reviews > Adobe Photoshop 6.0 [OLD VERSION]

Obviously people considering photoshop 6.0 are faced with having to justify spending this amount of money on a piece of software. Many would-be buyers do considerable work with graphics and photos, and many can justify the cost by pointing to new features and usability. When I bought 5.0 in 1999, I was convinced that the increase in productivity and durability of the product would pay for itself.

How wrong I was!!! In the first place, when I upgraded to Windows ME, I was surprised to find that Photoshop 5.0 didn't work and support couldn't help me at all. Their only suggestion was to upgrade to 6.0, which definitely had ME support. Wait, so spending $500 means that I can't upgrade my operating system without paying $200 for an upgrade? No patches?

I'm not a real fan of Paint Shop Pro or Gimp (both have deficiencies and usability problems), but they offer comparable features at a fraction of the cost. Plus, you're more protected in the event of OS upgrade or Adobe's failure to deliver free patches. Unless you think only 2 years of productivity is worth $600, your interests might be better served by buying a cheaper product and learning it inside out and out.

While this is by far Adobe's best Photoshop edition, they have yet to correct several serious problems. The new Photoshop 6.0 still lacks many features when an image is in 36-bit mode or 48-bit mode (12 or 16-bits/channel instead of 8-bits/channel). The majority of the editing features, including most of the filters and important tools such as the rubber stamp and airbrush functions, are unavailable in these mode. This is a serious detractor since most of today's newest scanners work in at least 36-bit mode.

Despite the fact that I have a 750Mhz PIII with 192MB RAM, Photoshop is still very slow to load and takes an incredible amount of time to import images when they are batch scanned. If you intend to scan several high resolution images at once or plan to work on more than one high resolution at a time on the screen, be prepared to wait while Photoshop 6.0 processes all the information.

Despite these two shortcomings, Adobe Photoshop 6.0 is an excellent product. Anyone interested in doing serious digital photography must have this product, as nothing else on the market comes close to this product's abilities. Photoshop's wide array of filters and editing tools allows you to do whatever you want with an image. Additionally, when used with Adobe's other software, Photoshop allows one to create professional web pages, brochures, and digital art. Adobe Photoshop 6.0 is by far the best digital imaging product on the market today.

I'm not going to waste time by listing all the new features since most have already been written about in the other reviews. I do want to say that the upgrade to Photoshop 6 is a true upgrade, not just bug fixes in a new box. I love it, and the new contextual menu bar. The improved text tool will save you so much time if you regularly work with text. Everything has been revamped to streamline the workflow, and now even Photoshop has slice tools so you no longer need to go to IR if you only want to dice your images.

Also, I want to comment on the speed complaints. I am running a P3 700 with 320mb of ram and the upgrade is faster than 5.5. Don't believe the requirements on the box. To get maximum speed out of Photoshop you need at least 256mb of ram and more if you work on large images. RAM is dirt cheap as of this writing,... a 128mb dimm. RAM is the most overlooked speed bottleneck in computers. Go for the RAM...it will increase system and stability more than just adding a faster processor.

I recently purchased a copy of Adobe Photoshop 6.0, and it blew away all other graphics programs that I have previously tried (most recently JASC Paint Shop Pro). Adobe Photoshop 6 offers you tools that used to be available only to graphics professionals! Using Photoshop, you can easily transform your ordinary pictures into extraordinary works of art using filters, which are simple to use. The program can save in a variety of formats, so you'll never have to be at a loss for file type, and can work with just as many file types. The program is extremely adaptable, and you can add plug-in's that will do everything from add new filters for your use to altering the way you work with documents! I am a novice at graphics work, and I find Photoshop to be one of the easiest programs out there!

Bundled with Photoshop, is a handy program called ImageReady which will allow you to work with animated files! Create that GIF file for your webpage that you can't seem to find anywhere else... It is simple with Photoshop!

This program does have some flaws in it. The program takes up an INCREDIBLE amount of system resources, so if you are working on a slow system do NOT try this product... If you are going to use this, make sure to get as much memory as you can you will need it. The price is also astronomical, but for the capabilities that you get, it is well worth every penny!

PhotoShop is without a doubt the best digital image editing software on the market. However, Adobe seems to have placed testing of the application on the users who fork over the big bucks and stake their livelihood on its use. If you check the User to User Forum on Adobe's WebSite, you will see the large number of problems people are experiencing with this product. Foremost is speed. Take the minimum system requirements on the box and times those by 4 if you expect it to run efficiently. Also there are many features that either do not work correctly or were just not thought out well when designed. If you are a graphics professional, you will find some of the new features and design a work flow killer. The guides and slice tool are not precise, the text tool is half thought out and there are many features hidden away in right mouse click menus such as text attributes like bold and italic and layer options (you can't rename layers without going to a menu anymore). There is a complete lack of consistency between PhotoShop, ImageReady and Illustrator, which makes no sense at all. I am finding myself switching back and forth between 5.5 and 6. Hopefully, with all of the complaints, Adobe is finding out what real world users need in an application (not what programmers and product people think we need) and are working on a patch.