I used the full commercial version of Photoshop for years. The copy installed on my personal Mac wasn’t licensed to me, but to somebody in my household (but I wasn’t using it for commercial purposes). So since I no longer live in that household I went ahead and deleted Photoshop and replaced it with my own legitimate copy of Photoshop Elements 6. I can’t afford the “full” version of PS, and in any case it’s overkill for the kinds of things I do.
I had tried out an earlier version (v.4, maybe?) of PS Elements and really liked it. It was basically “Photoshop Lite”. Everything, including the user interface (keyboard shortcuts, etc.), worked exactly like the full version of PS — it simply lacked many of the full version’s features, mainly with regard to the professional print media tools, which I didn’t use anyway. So it took no effort to learn how to use it - I already knew how.
PSE 6 is a whole different animal. They’ve completely dumbed-down the interface and turned it into a “home photo editing” program, complete with a tarted up “toolbox” interface. It’s requiring me to completely re-learn the software from the ground up, which is extremely frustrating.
My biggest gripe is the fact that the interface forces me to do all my work with the image confined within the fancy-schmancy “box” and surrounded on all sides by toolbars that I can’t “hide”. What I really want to be able to do is simply view my image “full screen”. This is mainly because one of my most common uses for Photoshop was to create desktop wallpapers. When I’m designing something that is exactly the size of my screen, it’s extremely helpful if I can view the entire image at full-size. In the full commercial version of Photoshop I could do this by simply typing “F” once to eliminate the window border around the image, then again to get rid of the Mac menubar, and finally “Tab” to hide the Photoshop interface (tool palettes, etc.). That would leave nothing on the screen but my image and the cursor.
I have not found any way to do this in PS Elements 6. Is there a way?