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.

If you’ve used older versions of Elements, you may be surprised to find that Elements 11 doesn’t recognize your scanner, even though your old version did. That’s because Adobe has stopped installing the  necessary TWAIN plug-in, although they still provide it with Elements.

It’s super simple to take of this, though.

Windows: Go to C:\Program Files [Program Files(x 86) for 64-bit systems]\ Adobe\Photoshop Elements 11\Optional Plug-Ins\ and move the Import-Export folder  to C:\ Program Files [Program Files(x 86) for 64-bit systems]\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 11\Locales\en_US\Plug-Ins (the “en_US” part will be different if you aren’t in the United States). If you don’t want to hassle with this, you may be able to use WIA (the Windows system scanning) instead, from both the Editor and the Organizer.

Mac: Go to Applications>Adobe Photoshop Elements 11>Support Files>Optional Plug-Ins and move the ImportModules folder into Applications>Adobe Photoshop Elements 11>Support Files>Plug-Ins.

This is a bit different from the last couple of versions where you just moved the actual plug-in file, but it’s just as easy to do.

EDIT Well, that’s the official way to do it, but a little experimenting shows that a much simpler file path that works just as well is to just grab the Import-Export s folder (depending on your operating system), and move it into the main Plug-ins folder.

So in Windows put the Import-Export folder into  C:\ Program Files [Program Files(x 86) for 64-bit systems]\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 11\Plug-Ins. The Mac file path is the same as the one given above.

It’s not only the lack of Organizer that makes the Mac App Store version of Elements 9 different. In order to comply with the App Store rules about installation and updates, the App Store version of Elements 9 has completely different file paths.

The things that Elements normally strews all over your hard drive are all contained within the app itself in this version. So, for instance, say you need to move TWAIN.plugin from the Optional Plug-ins->ImportModules folder into the regular Plug-ins->ImportModules folder so that you can scan into Elements.

You can look around in your Applications folder till your eyes ache and you won’t find anything. Instead, if you right click the PSE 9 Editor itself and choose Show Package Contents->Contents, you’ll find all those folders hiding in there:

So far so good. But when you try to move TWAIN.plugin, you’re going to see this unfriendly message:

Don’t let it put you off. Just click Authenticate, and you’ll be asked for your OS X account password and then you can successfully move the file. Oddly, you can delete files in here without authentication.

However, there’s one very serious problem with the App Store version of Elements 9. It doesn’t care bediddly about the file mediaDatabase.db3. If you like to install extra stuff into Elements, like layer styles, actions for the Effects panel, and so on, it just doesn’t work here. Anything that requires forcing Elements to regenerate this file is a complete no-go, since after you delete it, Elements runs just fine without it and sees no need to recreate it. This means the only way to run actions is from the Actions Player in Guided Edit (look in the folder Contents->Application Data for the things you’d normally find in Hard Drive->Library->Application Support). You can’t install anything into the  Effects or Contents panels, so no add-on tools, no layer styles, etc. Brushes aren’t affected by this, but Smart Brush presets you make yourself are.

For that reason, I’d recommend sticking with the other versions of Elements (boxed or Adobe download) until Adobe fixes this, if you haven’t yet bought Elements 9.