Keep your photo collection in order with this essential extra that comes with Photoshop Elements. The latest version Photoshop Elements not only includes new features for image editors to enjoy, it boats enhanced tools too.
In Photoshop Elements 9 there is a new welcome screen from which you can choose between Organize and Edit tabs to either begin image manipulations straight away or sort through your library of images first.
The Organize function in Elements is handy for arranging all of your photos and videos in one place. Due to the thumbnail display, which can be customized to suit how you prefer to view images, it is easy and quick to locate just the photos you want to work with and arrange them accordingly. The latest version even includes automatic People Recognition that cleverly detects the faces of people in your photos.
This technology analyses your people shots and brings up a window with ll of the faces highlighted. You can then tag these people, and in the future, you can just type in someone’s names to find all the pictures of them. You can also add a simple star rating to images. There are five stars underneath each image and you can click on them to light them up. You can then choose to filter your images based on their star rating – a good way to find all your best shorts, or even the bad ones that need to be edited further.
Your images can be keyworded, which means that you can add personal tags that identify your images. There are a preset selection of tags, such as people, location and so on, and each of these can be used as search criteria.
The Organizer used to just be available for PCs, but the latest version, Version 9, now offers the Organizer t Mac users. If you have Premiere Elements for video-editing too, then you can use the same Organizer for both still and moving images, helping to keep your entire media collection in one place and happily sorted.
Quick save
The first time that you save a new file, use the Save As command as we have described, so that you can set the file name and format. Then, if you continue working on the image, you can just use File>Save instead, which save your progress to the same file. It can be easier to get used to the keyboard shortcut, which is the Apple/Cmd key if you’re using a Mac, or the Ctrl key if you’re using a PC, plus the ‘S’ key at the same time.
Thumbnail views
There are a number of the ways that you can choose to view your images which are selected here. You can have thumbnails of various size and you can filter by star rating to give a more accurate choice of photos.
Common file types
JPEG is the most common file format. It is used because it offers smaller file sizes but that can lead to loss of quality. When you choose to save in JPEG, you are given a slider to set the quality. PSD is a Photoshop document and is needed if you are saving a multi-layered document. TIFF results in large but in good quality files. Use this when you need the optimum quality.
01 Add images
The first thing that you need to do is add images to the organizer, which you can easily do from the File menu.
02 Import options
When you are importing pictures you can ask Elements to correct red eye as it goes, or to suggest photo stacks of similar images.
03 Sort the view
By default, you will see the last images imported, however if you want to change this, you can pick a different album to view.
04 Show all
Hit the Show All button to see all of your images in one go. Using the stars underneath you can set individual ratings for your images too.
05 Filter by rating
When you have rated all your images, you can then use the rating filter to isolate just the images that you want to use.
06 Large view
Click on any image in the Organizer and you can see it bigger in the central screen, where you can add a caption, for example.
07 Tagging
Using the Keyword Tags panel, you can enter things like location, which you can use to sort your images at a later date.
08 Get tagging
If there are people in your shot, you can ask Photoshop Elements yo use People Recognitio, which search a photo for faces.
09 Name game
When all of the faces have been found, you can see them individually and then add names for these people underneath their pics.