Adobe releases retooled Photoshop Elements 11, Premiere Elements 11

I don't know if I missed something, but I didn't see anywhere if this "retooling" includes Retina support.

 

I wondered that as well... We'll never know...

Adobe sucks.  Photoshop can kiss my @$$.  I can't wait for someone else to come along and start them on their final death march.  Adobe needs some good competition or a good push off a cliff.  

"Adobe sucks"- then you proceed to state no one is better. Ok....

Well it is true - Adobe, for all of their faults, has a lock in with Photoshop since there is nothing that can stand up to it feature to feature with the kind of industry following that Photoshop has.  Nothing in the same league, not Gimp, not Pixemator - it is the industry standard for a reason - it does a darn good job at what it does and nothing out there can knock it off it's throne.

For the consumer market there's GIMP and Pixelmator, depending on the approach someone wants to take, but no comparison on a professional level. If someone is going to come along and compete with a program like Photoshop it is going to have to be something which evolves slowly to compete with it over time. Maybe something like Pixelmator can become just that. It would be nice for Adobe to have a little more pressure on pricing and features.

I use Pixlemator and it does what I need it to do. However, if I had the money, I'd go for Photoshop. I used it a lot during the 7.0 and CS times. The last one I tried was CS5 when it was available as trial. I wouldn't mind going back to it if I could afford it.

Why the hate towards Adobe? Yeah, Flash on iOS fiasco was a chore to sit through; but other than that they're the #1 creative media software publisher for a reason.

They do have competition in the market place (you're ignorant if you think they don't) - If you don't like Adobe Premiere then go for the next best Alternative; Sony Vegas. If you don't like Photoshop Elements then go download GIMP2.8 or purchase Pixelmator.

 

Easy. :)

 

For professional image editing I've yet to see a good alternative to Photoshop. The feature set is staggering.

I agree with the Adobe sucks comment. Their upgrade pricing for a consumer package is ridiculous. So their UI team screws with the UI and they want to give people that bought the last version recently 20% off? Is that token supposed to build loyalty? It just makes people wait for a more substantial upgrade and catch it on sale. A more reasonable price would keep us updating from version to version.

You said it! So staggering that it continues to get slower doing everyday tasks, even as processors, GPUs and disks get faster and faster. The feature set in the whole Creative Suite is even more boggling... even for Adobe I think. There's so much incomplete overlap and functions, that if you take a look at the Adobe forums, a huge number of their users don't even know which is the best program to use for a job any longer.

Examples: video editing now in Photoshop?! Seamless pattern creation in Illustrator, with major workarounds to use in Photoshop where patterns are used most? Character/paragraph styles now in PS, but no way to easily search and replace them? Indesign still using the old interface and old dialog boxes? No coherence whatsoever to the dialog boxes and settings across the suite, like the Para/Char styles, or even something so simple as the Scale dialog. Pen tool working differently in each program?

That's just a few "problems". The biggest one in my book, is that serious bugs within all of those "staggering" features get carried over from one release to the next. And what about that money grab with CS 5.5, where only a couple of programs actually saw any useful changes and/or bug fixes?

I don't begrudge Adobe there prices in the least... in fact, I would say they could be even more expensive for all I care, because I make a good living using there products. HOWEVER... since the sales and marketing trick of bundling the assorted programs as a "Creative Suite", the individual programs have gotten worse in real dollar and technology terms rather than better.

Also, the whole idea of moving everyone to the cloud and giving incentives allowing Cloud-subscribers to get new software and updates, rather than also allowing those that have spent 1000's over the years for perpetual licenses, does not sit well with me either.

But hey... you're absolutely right: there is no other company on earth building creative tools that can compete with Adobe's. Why is my instinct and experience telling me, that that's not a really good realization......?!

It depends on your needs.

I used to buy Photoshop Elements every time it came out. I'm through with that. Adobe has shown such disdain for Mac users that I don't desire to send them any more money. As you say, if I were a professional, I probably wouldn't have any choice. But as an amateur, GIMP or Pixelmator is good enough for me, so bye-bye, Adobe.

It's disappointing that Apple never made a professional graphics program. With all their core functionality (and their willingness to use the Core APIs rather than simply warming over a Windows version of the app), Apple could make an app that would kick the tar out of Photoshop.

I'm happy with my Photoshop Elements 5 I grabbed off eBay for $6 :)

Maybe get a faster computer matey or optimise the one you have. I use/used Photoshop CS5.1 on a Core i3 Sandy Bridge, Core i3 380M, Core i7 Sandy Bridge and a Core i5 480M. All of them ran smooth as silk. Hell, even on a Pentium it ran okay and didn't flatten the computer into giblets.

 

The bugs, yes, I still see some residual quirks but nothing that causes me a major problem. I've had nothing crash on me (yet). The stuff you say should be the same across all the applications (such as the pen tool and the resize dialogues) - why make them the same? If the brush was the same in Illustrator as in Photoshop I wouldn't be too impressed since the former is a vector graphics editor and the latter is a raster graphics editor. Different requirements need different tools.

 

Talking of differences, the Interfaces; I used InDesign CS5.5 when working on some brochures for a chemical company and the interface had the same layout as Photoshop. Pallet, layers etc at the right. Tool strip at the left. Tool options at the top (these were the Macintosh versions as well). The interfaces I was okay with - its the keyboard shortcuts that drove me banana nut butters. I have them all mapped to my Wacom tablet only to found out the CMD+Option+Z was not undo in anything other than Photoshop and Brush was not always "B" (just to give some examples). Those need unifying - but at least they're not as horrible as GIMP's default shortcuts (where, for example, the eraser is Shift+E and E is something completely different).

 

Some things I agree with you, some others are just nit picks you're blowing a little out of proportion.

Why would you assume that I or my many clients have slow computers? We don't... and in fact since the latest upgrades, all BTO fully loaded 27" i7 iMacs, with a smattering of 16-core/RAM-maxed MacPros. I personally haven't owned anything other than the fastest Mac that Apple can produce since 1985, and I tell my client's to not settle for anything less either. I recently advised someone on Adobe's forums to buy as much Mac/PC as possible and to whatever their budget would allow. There is no Mac or PC "fast enough" for the complete CS. Never has been and probably never will be.
So where did you get the idea that I meant "every" tool? What I did mean, is that if you have a tool... for example the bezier Pen tool... it should work the same across the suite. And you surely can't give me a good reason why it shouldn't.

Wow...you're easily pleased... because no... CS6 InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator do NOT have the same interfaces. Even Adobe admits that much. Where the toolbars or panels are located is completely irrelavent, because you can put them anywhere you want. Also don't forget that the docked panels were inspired by Macromedia mostly.
So I get this far along only to find out that you're not a power user and don't know how to change the keyboard shortcuts across the CS to anything you want. I've been using my own shortcuts now for some 20+ years, when you could change them using a little program called ResEdit. These days, it's built in and you can do anything you want, even exporting them so you can import them on different machines and across versions.

No... not really, considering you can do it yourself.

Just because you throw the point in that you use an X11/Linux app... doesn't make you more knowledgable about Adobe's products. I've been a beta tester, presenter and trainer, and worked with Adobe products from their very inception and v1 of every program they produce.

You should maybe visit the Adobe Forums some time, where I'm also a contributor for many years now. No. Sorry to say, I am not blowing things out of proportion. Adobe Photoshop CS6 Slow... or in general look at the top postings re: CS6-CS5 and performance Illustrator

FYI: There's more than a few of us older graphic professionals from the beginning of DTP, with the original LaserWriter, MacPaint, PageMaker... through Illustrator, FreeHand, LaserPaint, ReadySetGo, ColorStudio, KPT, etc up to the present... that will say the exact same as I have, and will again.

Adobe's product palette has become unwieldy and darn near unmanageable, and the individual programs within their suite have become unnecessarily bloated and are not coherent in their tasks and feature sets. Thus causing unnecessary speed degradation as technology has become ever faster.

Add to that, the fact that marketing, sales and the "bean-counters" have more sway over the products than the engineers do... and you get unnecessary and bug-ridden releases. IF Adobe was making serious changes to their platform and re-writing their software for future computing needs (such as Apple with maps), I could be more forgiving. I only see (eventually) mandatory Cloud integration... which I consider a "bean-counters dream" only. It truly is not for the users at this point in time. That's why Adobe is "inducing" potential users to subscribe to the cloud with free and timely access to updates and other software, while holding those back from perpetual license users. Yes again... Adobe admits this, as it's a significant portion of their current business strategy.

While Adobe is without a doubt, the only company worth considering for professional design tools and are the lone "standard bearer, they have become very similar to Microsoft with Office over the years. Neither one of these software behemoths have the balls to really rock the boat at this point, and truly re-imagine and recreate tools for the future. They are complacent and "tack on" features, give a facelift every couple of years, and call it a day.

The code-base for either MS or Adobe products?....2 words: "legacy luggage". Millions upon millions of lines and bytes of it!

With that in mind, just take a look at what the guys coding Pixelmator have achieved. A 70mb application vs. 543mb Photoshop (app only!), that does almost 75% of everything that Photoshop can do... 90% if you count daily tasks.

With that said, I'm still in Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator... all day... every day. However, I too like to dream: of a true Creative Suite, re-written and optimized, with a coherent and tight framework for each design process and task at hand. This was actually promised to the creative community already some 10-12 years ago. Sadly... we're still left to dreaming about it.

BTW: Keyboard Shortcuts management is at the bottom of the Edit menu of (almost) all CS software.

Like I said earlier, and as has been clearly highlighted by other apt readers, Adobe sucks.  Photoshop sucks.  Illustrator sucks.  Premiere sucks. Flash sucked, and thankfully it's beginning its death march.  

 

Pricing, features, performance, dissonance across titles in the suite, upgrade policies, upgrade frequency (or lack thereof), gouging, bloat, gloat...

 

Adobe.  Sucks.  

 

Rome was once the greatest empire on the planet.  And I'm sure anybody hoping for a better option then was ridiculed nearly as much as I am now for hoping that I, being the professional designer and photographer that I am, might have the choice of a company that doesn't crap all over its customers whenever the clock strikes the hour.  If you think the company cares about their customers (rather than pure profit) you are up in the night.  Don't misunderstand me — I'm a capitalist pig, and I'll die one.  And that's exactly why I know someone WILL come along and dethrone Adobe, and it won't be NEARLY as long before that happens as people think.  Companies, even those this big, cannot treat their customers the way Adobe does and live long to tell about it.  Go ahead.  Bookmark this post.  Come back and laugh at me in < 5 years.  I'll be waiting.

 

And while we're on the topic, let me try to understand this one thing: People dropped Final Cut Pro X because it was "Final Cut Consumer 2.0", and switched to Adobe Premiere, which is (according to their definition) "Final Cut Consumer Beta"?  People are idiots.  I daresay 90%+ of the people ridiculing the FCPX release never actually used it.  If they had, they would know they didn't actually know what the crap they were talking about.

Edited by macwise - 9/28/12 at 8:41am