Teach Yourself Photoshop Elements

I n the days of analogue film cameras we were limited to shooting batches of 24 or 36 photos, depending on the size of our film roll. All the photos tended to get printed and many would end up in easy-to-access photo albums. In these digital days we have the problem of managing our ever-growing collection of digital photos, especially now that phones shoot high-quality shots. By default, digital photos that are imported to our computers tend to get stored chronologically in the Pictures directory. This means we can spend too much time scrolling through folders and sub-folders in search of a particular shot, especially if we're unsure when it was captured. Photoshop Elements' Organizer offers a host of tools to help you find favourite photos with ease, and even…

W hen you launch Photoshop Elements by clicking its icon you're presented with a welcome screen. One half of the screen gives you the option to jump to the Organizer, where you can import and organise your shots. The other half launches the Photo Editor. Don't worry too much about which option you choose, because you can switch between the Photo Editor and the Organizer by clicking the appropriate icon. As its name suggests, the Photo Editor is designed to help you fix common picture problems. Its tone-tweaking tools enable you to restore more detail to under- or overexposed shots. Its colour-correction tools allow you to counteract colour casts caused by incorrect camera White Balance settings. You can also tackle lens-related problems such as vignetted or curved edges. The Photo…

T raditional film photographers could use a host of darkroom tools to develop their negatives into prints. Some of these tools enabled them to change contrast. By placing a piece of card over part of the print they could selectively lighten (dodge) tones in that part of the photo. By cutting holes in card they could mask most of an already exposed image and let more light hit certain areas to darken (burn) details. Photoshop Elements is your digital darkroom, with its own collection of photo-fixing tools. Indeed, many of the tools in Elements share the names of their analogue predecessors, such as the Dodge and Burn tools. Most of the tools can be found in the Toolbox, located at the left of the Expert Editor's workspace. These tools enable…

O n the previous two pages we looked at the various photo-fixing tools in the Expert mode's Toolbox and Tool Options. You can also edit a photo by combining various tools with the drop-down commands in the main menu bar at the top of the workspace. For example, you could use the Lasso tool to draw a selection marquee around a tree. You could then go to the Edit section of the main menu bar and click to open its options. By choosing the Copy option, you would copy the pixels within the selection marquee into your PC's clipboard. You could then choose Edit>Paste to create a duplicate of the selected pixels on a new layer. This technique is very similar to copying and pasting words in a word-processing package,…

1 Import your photos Launch Photoshop Elements and click the Organizer section of the welcome screen. The Photoshop Elements Organizer will open. Go to the main menu bar and choose File>Get Photos and Videos. You can then choose an option such as From Files and Folders. Browse to the folder of photos that you want to import. Tick Get Photos From Subfolder, then click Get Media. This will import the selected photos into the Photoshop Elements Organizer. 2 Organise your shots The imported photos will be displayed in chronological order in a grid of thumbnails. To make specific images easier to find in the future, hold down Cmd/Ctrl and select their thumbnails. Click the green + icon in the Local Albums section to create a new album containing the selected…

Modern memory cards (such as a 16GB SD card) can store a huge number of photos, especially if you tend to shoot in JPEG format. This means that hundreds of your precious pictures may only exist on a small piece of plastic that's very easy to misplace. To protect your irreplaceable pictures you should import them from the memory card into the safety of the Photoshop Elements Organizer as soon as you return from a shoot. In the following walkthrough we'll show you how to set up the Organizer's Photo Downloader to copy your shots into folders on your PC and display them in the Organizer. You can launch the Photo Downloader from the File menu, and it can also import pictures from files and folders already on your hard…