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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 37 found the following review helpful:
 CS5 rocks my boat! Jul 25, 2010
By J. Omohundro
I've been using Photoshop Elements for a few years now, and it was okay, but I upgraded my camera a year ago and started using Adobe Lightroom (another product that rocks my boat!), and I wanted to use a product that was well-integrated with Lightroom; Elements just wasn't there. Enter CS5.
I forgot to mention, too, that I recently made the switch to a Mac at home, so I needed to buy new licenses for everything anyhow. Not only was I looking for a photo editor and a DAM (digital asset manager) tool, I needed a panorama stitcher and an HDR tool. Lightroom is taking care of DAM, and CS5 is taking care of the rest.
PRO's:
* Everything is integrated under one roof for me -- basic image editing, HDR, panorama generation.
* If you have used Elements in the past, you already know part of the program...stuff is basically in the same places, and there's more features to do almost anything imaginable.
* Content-aware fill is almost unbelievable!
CON's:
* Price. Even at Amazon's lower price, it ain't chump change.
* Learning curve. Even though I've used Elements for a while, there is so much to this program that I need to learn. Guess I better buy some books from Amazon and get cranking!
50 of 61 found the following review helpful:
 Artist beware... Sep 15, 2010
By C. MacTavish
This is a lovely piece of software. It's got some great new features, there's no new interface to learn, and it can switch between 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Granted, this is a major pain when you have the audacity to want to add some lighting effects and have to close the program down, adjust the settings to 32-bit, then restart it and do what you want to do, before closing it, resetting it to 64-bit, and getting back to what you were doing.
So why, aside from those irritations, am I giving a program with 4-5 star features a paltry 2 stars? (4-5 star functionality, I should note, for my PERSONAL needs. There are scads of problems with CS5 borking printer and scanner drivers, and producing inconsistent prints that are simply unacceptable for those who do lots of printing work. I don't. Your needs and mileage may vary.)
Because even though it is a Mac program, it doesn't really play nice with Macs. At least, it doesn't play nice with NEW Macs. So, with that in mind...
A WORD OF WARNING -- do NOT upgrade yet if you have a computer that uses an i-Series processor! There are known incompatibilities between this processor series and CS5, which the latest patch/update has done NOTHING to fix (though it did smarten up the ridiculously laggy Liquify tool a little). I have a 2.66GHz MacBook Pro with an i7 processor and 4GB of RAM, with Photoshop being given a separate 1TB scratch disk. There is no reason why this system should not be able to handle a program like Photoshop CS5, especially when it's the only program running save for iTunes and Safari. AND YET...
Every. time. I use CS5, it ends up lagging not only Photoshop, but EVERY other program on my computer, necessitating mass Force Quits and a complete restart (sometimes cold, because the system refuses to respond to anything else). "It might be something else!" I hear you cry. Well, this ONLY happens when Photoshop CS5 is running. It does not happen at any other point; the system handles beautifully, so long as CS5 is not involved.
Unfortunately, Adobe is not exactly fast about getting this compatibility issue fixed. I would recommend that users with i-Series processors hold off on this upgrade until the company actually does something about it; CS3 was really the last build that worked on an i-Series processor without a host of issues. It has, however, been reported to work fine on the Core 2 Duo machines of builds past, so it may be worth a try there.
But if you have an i-Series, I strongly recommend you obtain a trial version of the software first, to see if the (absurdly) high price tag is still acceptable given the low performance.
25 of 31 found the following review helpful:
 Not compatible with Mac Snow Leopard Dec 20, 2010
By Mandon Gale
I had my Snow Leopard system installed by Apple. I have successfuly installed every program on my computer until I got to Photoshop CS5. With PS CS5 I got an error message saying "Installation to case-sensitive drives is not supported." I contacted Adobe support who knew nothing about this and said the problem was with Mac and that I needed to contact Apple. So basically "Photoshop CS5 for Mac" is not compatible with Mac. I contacted Apple customer support and talked to a helpful technician who basically had to go on to Adobe's site and forum boards (where this is apparently a very common problem). It is astonishingly unbelievable that I got better Adobe customer support from Apple than I did from Adobe.
After repairing permissions etc., the Apple technician determined the problem with the installation is sloppy scripting from Adobe programmers. The only workarounds are to completely reformat my hard drive and make it case-insensitive (which is not how it came) or to do what some kid did which is write a scripting program that changes the Access File Log's capital letters to lower case. This is a little over my head, but the Apple technician said to call Adobe and see if they could help me with that. They couldn't.
All in all, I paid several hundred dollars for a program that doesn't work on new Mac Book Pro and for a company that pushes away its customer support to Apple, who seemed remarkably 100 times more qualified to diagnose Adobe's scripting problems than Adobe itself.
It is unconscionable that Adobe Photoshop cannot provide support for its own product. Like I told the Adobe rep., I have installed a lot of professional grade software on my Mac without encountering ANY problems and the fact that the only problem I have is with Adobe Photoshop seems to indicate the problem is with Adobe and not Mac. Nevertheless, he told me my only solution was to contact Apple.
What a waste of money and time. Time to move on to Aperture.
9 of 10 found the following review helpful:
CS5 is easy to use. Jun 15, 2010
By D. C. Spaulding
I upgraded from CS to CS5. CS5 loads on my MAC mush faster and many of the tools are easier to use. Such as dragging
an image onto your work for a composite. Also, there are more fonts to choose from in the text tool. I have been using CS5 for
a month and worked on three projects. I have had no problems. I like it!
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
You made me an offer I couldn't refuse May 22, 2011
By P. Grabarz
To be perfectly honest, Photoshop Elements suits me just fine. I only paid $250! If I had to pay full price I wouldn't have made the purchase even though I had it on my bucket list. Be forewarned, you can't import direct from scanner. Knowing what I do now, I think Photoshop Lightroom 3 probably would have been a more suitable choice.
See all 28 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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