I’ve been an avid Adobe Photoshop Elements user since the days that Livejournal.com was hot in my middle school. I loved it! It was easy to use and inexpensive. I even had my own little icon request webpage and I enjoyed making graphics for other users. Well, my passion never died and I carried my love into making graphics for MySpace layouts. When I switched to Mac two years ago, I immediately purchased Adobe PE 4.0 for Mac. It worked just the same as it did on my old Windows system. I was a little disappointed when Windows received a new version of PE and Mac didn’t, but I was happy with my version so I didn’t think too much about it.
When I upgraded to Leopard I didn’t even think about it, I just assumed that all my existing software would work. I uploaded Adobe PE 4.0 onto Leopard and all seemed fine. Actually, all seemed fine for several months! Until one day, I couldn’t change the sensitivity value on the selection tool. I quit PE and re-opened it and still couldn’t change the value. From there, thing’s just got stranger! Everything began falling apart and soon enough, PE was unusable.
I decided to Google the issue and came to discover that I was lucky the program even loaded after my Leopard upgrade! It shouldn’t have worked in the first place! Why? Because it’s not compatible. Excuse me?! My beloved Adobe is allowing this to happen? I was in disbelief that, not only is Mac two updates behind Windows but there isn’t even a fix available for PE 4.0 on Leopard! I, personally, find this disgraceful.
How can Adobe do nothing while thousands of PE users are left with an unusable program?
I though so too. Reinstalling PSE 4 on my 10.5.1 installation resolved any problems I had. PSE4 works fine now.
I’ve been using PE 4.0 on 10.5.1 for a quite a while now and haven’t experienced any problems. I’m using it on the latest MacBook which came with Leopard so there was no upgrade from Tiger if that makes a difference.
No problem here, either. I use it on a Al 24 in Imac intel.
I’ve had problems with it. In fact it refuses to launch on my Leopard system. However, I have figured out that it is specific to my primary user account. When I switch to another it seems to run without issues. I’ve tried uninstalling and eliminating some obvious conflicting suspects but I just haven’t had time to figure out what the issue is in my primary account.
As a long time Mac user, it sounds to me like a corrupted plist file. Go to Library/Preferences and delete the .plist file listed for Photoshop Elements. (It should be something like com.adobe.Elements.plist. Log out and back in then try the application. In some cases, its not a bad file but a conflict with another preference file.
To troubleshoot, you can rename your current Preferences folder…I like to rename the old one something like Preferences2 so it’s next to the new one. Restart and a new folder will be created. If the application now works, you can drag from the old folder to the new one, a few preferences at a time, then logout and back in trying the app each time until the problem comes back. When it does, the problem will be in one of those you last dragged in.
Do some trouble shooting…I’m bett’n that since it worked at first, it’ll work again. Heck, I once had to do this with my entire home Library when Mail stopped working, to finally determine that my Aspell Dictionary was the problem….updated it and Mail came right back in line.
Same thing goes for kboggs…you have a bad file in your primary user’s account.
I’ve had no problems with PE 4 on Leopard. Mind you, I don’t do very complicated things with it. But it does what I ask it to.
Yours sincerely,
John Davis
Adobe just announced the new photoshop elements 6 for mac that is Universal binary! New for $90 bucks and upgrade for $70 USD. It was about time for that! I just bought a new iMac and I used the 30 days trial versions of CS2 and 3 until they expired… I kept the image ready CS2 and that’s what I’ve been using for the last month ! It’s just horrible.
My only concern with PE6 is that it seems that it evolved into a horrible “(stupid) user friendly” interfase.
ciao
Wow! Thanks for all the comments!
Lee- I am definitely going to try that out ASAP. I hadn’t been able to find any fixes before.
Fernando- It does seem to be the thing these days for developers to upgrade programs with horribly stupid “user friendly” interfaces. Hopefully though, it won’t be completely unbearable.
If Lee’s fix doesnt work out for me I’ll just do the upgrade.
Thanks again!
Simone Renee