Intro To Photoshop Elements Part 1

This video is and introduction to Photoshop Elements for beginners. It focuses on getting familiar with the basic workflow of PE.

Hello, and welcome to Pixel Paint Paper’s digital scrapbooking tutorials. In this video, we will focus on getting familiar with all the cool features available for scrapbooking in Photoshop Elements.

This video was created with the beginner in mind, so that you can get the most out of what Elements has to offer. Let’s begin.

When you first launch Photoshop Elements and in this video tutorial, I’m using 5.0, you will see this welcome screen. It has five different options. If you roll over each one, it gives a brief description of what it will do.

At the top of this welcome screen, you will see five easy options to help you get started. Today, we’re going to look at the View and Organize Photos. Photoshop Elements is a great tool to help you organize your photos and keep them all in one location, so they are easy to find for your projects.

Once the Organizer has launched, click on the camera icon located here at the top. From it, you will see five different options to choose from, select Folders and Files.

This way, you can select your photos that have already been imported onto your computer. Click on the folder that you would like. Select Get Photos. Then Photoshop Elements will begin to import your photos from that folder into the Organizer.

Once the import is complete, the Organizer workspace gives you several options for organizing your photos. On the right side of the palette, you’ll see two options, Tags and Collections. Under Collections you can create separate folders that you can drag and drop your photos into to keep them separate, that way you have an easy way of finding them.

Over here, I’ve already created two collections. One of them is called Thomas and Friends. Some of the photos that I just imported were from a trip that I took with my children to visit Thomas when he was in town.

I’m going to quickly drag and drop those photos right into the collection so I know exactly where to find them the next time I want to look for them. When you click and drag over to the palette, you see this little icon pops up. The icon is also underneath the image thumbnail, showing that it is now part of the Thomas collection.

When you want to add multiple photos, click and drag by selecting the photos that you want. You will know they’re selected by the blue highlight around each thumbnail. Simply click and drag them to the collection.

You will know that all the photos have been imported into the proper collection by double-clicking on the menu here on the right. As you can see, all the photos are now under the Thomas and Friends collection. Click on "Back to All Photos" to return to your main navigation window.

Another cool feature that makes organizing a snap in Photoshop Elements Organizer workspace is by using the tags that you can see up here. Click on the "tag" menu, and you have different options as to where these tags would belong, like Favorites, Hidden, People, Family, Friends, Places, Events, Other, and imported tags that you may have attached to your photos before you even imported them into Photoshop Elements.

To add a tag to an individual image, click on it so that you can see the image enlarged. Then you want to click on the New under Tags, and we are going to type in Thomas. I’m going to categorize that under Events. You can also add a little note if you want to. Click okay.

As you can see, Thomas has now been added under Events. Once you have your tag created, you can now drag and drop the photo right under the tag, and now it has been added, underneath the photo.

You can also click here to add a caption if you’d like. I’m going to head back and begin adding some more photos under that tag. Another feature in the Organizer workspace is that you can view by date when your photos were created. Simply click on the date view, and we are in the day view area. The date that this photo was created was August 10th, and there were several photos that were taken on this date.

You can also view by month by clicking on the month tab. You can see when you roll over the thumbnail under August 9th there are 22 items that were taken on that particular day. So this is another great way to view your photos and keep them organized.

Now let’s return to the photo browser. Another great feature in the Organizer workspace is the option to be able to view two photos that are similar side by side so that you can compare them and see which photo actually looks better. To do that, I’m going to select both the photos that I would like to see, and you can do that by pressing the Control key and clicking on both items at the same time.

Next, I’m going to select View and Compare Photos Side by Side. This is going to open up a full screen window, and as you can see, both photos are right next to each other. With a quick glance, I can see that one photo’s probably a little bit better than the other one.