Help! 2006 imac need Mountain Lion to run Photoshop elements

Your 2006 iMac will not run Mountain Lion, it is not capable. I suggest you purchase an older version of Elements that will run on Snow Leopard.

I know its a downer however you should look at the manufacturer's minimum system requirements prior to spending your hard earned money. Considering your iMac is 8 years old, have your considered retiring it for a new or even an Apple refurbished Mac?

Lion will run on your iMac. However......running in 3gb of ram may not produce the pleasant experience that you may hope for. Your Mac maxes out at 4gb of ram and because of that, in my opinion, you're better off sticking with Snow leopard. Lion WILL run but you may end up with spinning beach balls while your Mac pages out to disk because you don't have enough ram.

The new version PSE will run on OS X 10.7 Lion.

PSE 12 runs on 10.7- 10.9

Here are the system requirements for OS X 10.7 Lion.

To use Lion, make sure your computer has the following:

• An Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor
• Mac OS X v10.6.6 or later to install via the Mac App Store (v10.6.8 recommended); you can install without Mac OS X v10.6 by using an OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive, available on the Apple Online Store
• 7 GB of available disk space
• 2 GB of RAM

To find out info about your system

Click on the Apple symbol in the upper left of the OS X main menu bar. A drop down menu appears. Click About this Mac. A smaller popup window appears. This gives you basic info like what version of OS X your iMac is running, the speed of your iMac's CPU and how much RAM is installed.

Click on the button that says More Info. A larger window appears giving you a complete overview of your iMac's hardware specs.

Highlight all of this info and copy/paste all of this into another reply to this post, editing out your iMac's serial number before actually posting the reply. This will tell us everything about your iMac so we may begin to help with your iMac issues.

If your 2006 iMac can run Lion then you can purchase a Lion install code here.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/D6106Z/A/os-x-lion

Before installing a major systems upgrade, it would be prudent to have a viable backup of your current system and important data in case something should go wrong with the installation.

Good Luck!

You're good to go for the Lion upgrade!

My only big issue is that your iMac really have enough RAM to have your Mac running Lion and other resource intense applications like Photoshop.

One of the other users here mentioned that, already.

I do not know where you are from, but if you have access to Amazon.com, maybe you should consider staying on OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leoaprd (I still use Snow Leopard, also) and look for an older version of Photoshop Elements that'll still run on Snow Leopard.

Photoshop Elements 10 and 11 run on OS X Snow Leopard.

Also, seeing you are only looking to run PSE, another Phoroshop equivalent and cheaper alternative, if you do a search on Amazon, look for older version of Pixelmator. Pixelmator is a good PSE alternative.

The older versions that ran on OS X 10.5 and 10.6 are not as good as the most recent version that run on OS X Mavericks, but it may have enough features to do what you need at a fraction of what PSE costs.

Just a thought.

BACKUP YOUR SYSTEM AND IMPORTANT DATA, FIRST BEFORE UPGRADING!!!

I have a few more questions to put to you as you never mentioned anything about this.

Are you new to image editing?

Have you used Photoshop before?

Why do you need Photoshop?

What are you planning to use Photoshop for?

Are you a hobbyist, novice, semi-pro, or pro photographer?

The reason I am asking these questions is if you never used a sophisticated image editor before than learning any image editor is going to be a learning curve for you.

I just, recently purchased very cheaply, I may add, from Amazon.com, Apple's own Pro image editor and image management software Aperture 3.

You maybe able to find this cheap on Amazon, also. The final version of Aperture 3 that runs on Snow Leopard is 3.2.4.

Again,,putting some more Snow Leopard alternatives out there for you.

I got an open box version of Aperture for $20 USD. I got all the original packaging and documentation (documentation also in like new condition) reg codes and the install disc, itself, was in like new condition.

I hope this all works out for you.

FYI,

Aperture is also designed to work with RAW files, also ( it's a pro App and has its own image management and cataloging capabilites, also)

Good Luck!

😉