I’ve been getting a lot of questions about PSE and the latest OS X update, 10.9 (Mavericks). The news is mostly good: all versions of PSE that I’ve tried (6 through 12) work just fine, with one exception. If you have PSE 11, the Comic and Graphics Novel filters will crash PSE. So far I don’t know a solution for this. Also, I haven’t tried installing or uninstalling, and that could be a problem with the oldest versions.
If you upgrade to Mavericks, it is very important to delete all existing PSE, Organizer, and Bridge (for PSE 6 and 8) preferences. To do this, you need to go to your username->Library->Preferences and delete everything relevant there.
Mavericks is a bit different than the past couple of versions of OS X, thankfully, for how you get to that library. Open a Finder window and click your user account in the list on the left side of the window. Now go up to the top of the window and and click the button with the gear icon on it. Choose Show View Options from the popout menu. If you look down the list of checkboxes, you’ll see the library at the bottom of the list. Turn this on and from now on it will show up in the top level of results when you click on your name in any Finder window:
If you don’t delete all the preferences, you are likely to have problems. If you do, things should go fairly smoothly, although some people find that older versions of PSE tend to run more slowly in 10.9 than in earlier versions of OS X. Which preferences? It depends on which version you have, but you want to look for files and folders beginning Adobe Photoshop Elements, Elements Organizer, and com.adobe. Here’s the trash on my mac after doing this, if it helps:
EDIT A reminder to PSE 6 users who are upgrading from 10.6: you must make sure you don’t have PSE 6 set to run in Rosetta before you upgrade OS X. This is about Lion, but it still pertains:
http://barbarabrundage.com/2011/07/29/photoshop-elements-6-and-lion
Oh, incidentally, if you have PSE 11 and your menus are grayed out after updating, that usually means you need to update the driver for your Wacom tablet.
