Photoshop Elements 8 comes with two new features that may be useful, but can cause new users some problems. These features are the Auto Analyze function and the ablilty to automatically backup your photos to Photoshop.com and/or sync your catalog with another computer.

Both of these are a drain on your computer resources, and the backup/sync can cause a new user problems. I do not use either of these features, although I do use Photoshop.com to share my photos.

I have included a short video here that demonstrates how to turn these features off if they are not already deactivated. First, open PSE 8 in the Organizer mode. Then on the Menu bar, click on Edit > Preferences > Backup/Synchroniztion. CLICK HERE to view the video.

Even after you turn these features off, you will still get a message that pops up randomly on photos asking “Who’s this?” This can also be turned off by clicking on Edit > Preferences > Tags and Albums > People Recognition Hints > Hide.

Don

Hello Everyone,

I am excited to announce a new class that I will be teaching in about three weeks for the Palos Verdes on the Net  (PVNET) organization. Since this class will be a basic introduction to digital photography, it may not be of interest to those of you that regularly follow my blog. However, you may have friends that are just beginning the journey into digital photography. I would appreciate it if you would let them know about the class. On the other hand, you may also be interested yourself, as a brief review.  Below is a basic description of the class:

Are you new to digital photography? Did you just get your first digital camera and are wondering what comes next? This class may be just what you are looking for. In the course you will begin by taking a series of pictures of Point Vicente Park and the PV coastline. During the course, you will use Photoshop Elements 8 to upload your pictures to the computer, organize them so they can be quickly found, improve their color and brightness, make a simple slide show and other creations, and finally learn how to share them via email, ordering prints, or uploading them to photo sharing websites.

As you can tell by the description, we cover a lot of ground. However, we do not go nearly as deep into any of the topics as we do in my normal classes. The whole idea is give the student a clear idea of what digital photography is all about. The added nice feature is that those taking the class will use the pictures they take on the first day of class throughout the rest of the course. What’s really cool as that basically stepping outside the class room, there is a great view of Catalina, Point Vicente Park and the Palos Verdes coastline.

Here are some of the details.

Working Title: An Introduction to Digital Photography – The Basics
When: Mondays, beginning November 16th from 10:00 am to 12:00 noon for five weeks
Where: PVNET Annex Computer Technology Center, located at 30940 Hawthorne Blvd., Rancho Palos Verdes, 90275. The Computer Technology Center is located adjacent to the Palos Verdes City Hall.

The cost of the  five week, ten hour course is approximately $50. The computer center has sixteen computers (so the class will probably fill up quickly) and provides an excellent learning environment. One of the features I really am looking forward to using is a program called Insight. With this program, I can beam my computer screen directly to each one of the student’s computer monitors. This makes it much easier for the student to see what I am demonstrating. And as stated in the description above, we will be using PSE 8. However, if you or your friends have earlier versions, don’t worry; they will work fine.

As far as I know this is the first public announcement for this class. The PVNET web site should show it soon with instructions on how to register. Also, look for a flyer inside the Daily Breeze in the next couple of weeks.

To find out more about how to register for the class, as well as an aerial map showing the location of the Annex Computer Technology Center, click here.

This opportunity to teach the class came up unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago, which explains why you may not see any reference to it yet on the PVNET web site. That should change very soon. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email me of comment below. I will keep you posted of any new developments.

Take care,

Don

Below is a link to a video that provides a brief tour of the Organizer in PSE 8. Actually it’s not so brief. The video runs about 20 minutes. Like all of my videos, it is certainly rough around the edges, but hopefully it gives you an idea what the main differences and enhancements are in PSE 8.

The video should begin to play after a few seconds once you click on the link. I did notice that for some reason, my laptop did not show the play/pause button. This means I had to watch it all of the way through. However, my desktop did diplay the play/pause controls. I think it’s a resolution problem with my laptop.

I plan to do something similar to show you the changes and new features in the Editor of PSE 8.

Click here to play the video.

Again, please comment on it’s usefulness, problems viewing it or lack thereof, and any ideas you have for future videos.

Until next time,

Don

Here are a few more video tutorials I made using Photo Shop Elements 6. I made them as backups for one of my lecture cruises just in case I had laptop computer problems and was unable to do the live demonstration. Fortunately, I did not need to use them. They are not very polished, but I think they are clear enough to be helpful. Even though the videos are using PSE 6, they very similar to what you see/do using PSE 7 or now PSE 8.

They do require Active X control (whatever that means), so you will will need to click on the little thin message that appears at the top of your browser after you click on the link to continue. Also, to best view the video press the F11 key, so it displays full screen.

Also, you may find it better to right click on the link and select Save Target as…. Then download the file to your desktop and play the tutorial from there.

1. General Introduction
2. Quick Fix Window
3. Guided Edit – Shadows and Highlights (a different picture than used in the video tutorial posted earlier)
4. Levels Command
5. Panorama – Part 1
6. Panorama – Part 2

I have a couple of more that I will include in a future post if it appears they are useful to anyone. So please comment, ya or nay. Also, let me know if you have trouble viewing them. I may be able to help you.

I apologize for the confusing formating of yesterday’s post. I tried to send the formatting I laid out in Word to my blog, but somewhere along the way the step numbering got messed up. I’ve since cleaned it up a bit.

Also, I’ll have more to say about this in the next installment, but for now, make sure you do the following. When you begin to make your slide show in the Organizer’s Slide Show Editor, set the flag to crop landscape pictures in the Slide Show Preferences dialog box.

Until next time,

Don

It is relatively straight forward to make a slide show in Photoshop Elements and then the using its output as the input to your DVD burning program to end up with a DVD that plays on your widescreen television. The only problem is the final image on your screen will have borders. Generally, we are more than willing to accept this so as not to compromise our initial composition, especially if our pictures include a lot of portrait mode images.

If we are willing to recompose/crop our images, and accept the fact that those that remain in portrait mode will have borders, we can end up with a DVD that will present the slide show utilizing the full 16:9 aspect ratio screen. It does require several steps to do this, but none of the steps are that difficult.

I will assume you are using one of the later versions of PSE to make your slide show. For most of the steps, I’ll assume you know how to do the details. My purpose is to concentrate on the steps and their sequence. We’ll cover the first several steps in this post. In a later post, I’ll discuss burning the DVD.

1. Select the pictures that you want to include in your slide show. If your basic order in your slide show is going to be in sequence by time, make sure you are viewing your pictures in the Organizer by Oldest First.
   
2. Put them into a new Album and then adjust their order as needed.
   
3. Select all of the pictures in your slide show and then click File > Export on the Menu bar. The Export dialog box shown below will open.
   

4. Enter the following information:

• File Type = JPEG
  
• Photo Size = Custom > 1920×1080 (Full HD Resolution)
  
• Quality = 12
  
• Location = Browse to/make the folder where you want to save these images. This is a temporary folder that you can delete using Windows Explorer after you have burned your DVD.
  
• Filenames = Select Common Base Name; type in the desired name
  
• Click Export. The pictures will be copied and renamed at this point.
  

5.  We are going to crop the pictures to a 16:9 ratio using Microsoft’s Photo Gallery. Photo Gallery comes with Vista. If you are using Windows XP, Photo Gallery Live can be downloaded for free. It has the same capability we will be using.
6.  Open Photo Gallery and navigate the folder you just exported the images to. Select all of the pictures to make things go as quickly as possible.

7. .  On the Menu bar click on Fix. Then in the right pane select Crop Picture > Custom > 16:9. Now adjust the size and position to accommodate the desired and possible composition. I usually make the rectangle as large as I can first and then move it within the image get the composition I want. Click Apply and then the left point arrow in the viewer to advance to the next image.
 

8.  Repeat Step 7 for all of your pictures.
9.  Now go back to PSE and import the cropped/sized images into your Catalog using File > Get Photos and Videos > Files and Folders. You may want to make a second Album, but you don’t really need to. However, you will want to give this group of photos a Tag so you can quickly archive or delete them later when your DVD slide show is totally done.
10.  Now make your slide show using the Slide Show Editor in the normal way.
This concludes the workflow or steps for this installment. In a future post, I’ll cover outputting the slide show from the Slide Show Editor and then actually burning the final DVD.

By not only cropping the images to the 16:9 aspect ratio, but also significantly reducing their file size, the follow-on steps to actually burn the DVD with a video editing program will go much more smoothy. In fact, for long slide shows, working with these smaller images may be the only way your computer will be able to complete the task. However there is something to remember. Do not reduce the file size for those pictures you are planning to zoom in real close using the pan/zoom feature of the Slide Show Editor. For best quality you want to retain all of the pixels possible.

Until next time, take care.

Don

Hi Everyone,

I got back from my recent Oregon road trip a few days ago. I had a great visit with friends, enjoyed being treated like a king, and had an opportunity to photograph some great scenery. I was gone a week and put just over 2000 miles on my car. I am beginning to get a little more involved with my Facebook account. I’ve posted a few pictures on my Facebook page. You can see them by going to www.facebook.com/don.stouder1.

Now on with the real reason for this post. We all know how easy it is to keep track of our photographs and video clips using the Organizer in Photoshop Elements. We can quickly find pictures using categories and tags, as well as several other features in PSE without worrying about where the specific pictures are located on our hard drive. However, what if you are not in the Organizer and want to locate and select a particular picture or group of pictures?

What if you want to upload an image to eBay? Or what if you want to share some pictures on a photo sharing site like Facebook, Flickr etc. What about uploading some images to Costco or CVS for printing? Using these and similar services generally involve browsing to the folder where your selected images are stored on your computer while you are filling out their online form. The EXPORT command of PSE is a great way to collect your selected photos and copy them to a folder that is easy to browse to while you are online.

I have a dedicated folder on my Desktop I use just for this purpose. Once the images have been uploaded, I delete them from this folder so that I don’t have multiple copies taking up unneccessary room on my hard drive. Because PSE copies the selected images, there is no impact on my Catalog. The originall images are left untouched. Also, as you will see in the tutorial, the EXPORT command also allows you to resize and rename you copied images.

Click here to see a short video on using the EXPORT command. I’m still experimenting with different video formats for posted video tutorials. This one is a .mov file and requires the free Quicktime player to view it. It is about 10 Mb in size, so you may want to download it before viewing it. To download it, right click on the above link and follow the screen prompts. If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to comment below.

Finally, those of you waiting for my Torrance fall teaching schedule, I’ve been promised  it in a couple of days. As soon as I know what it will be, I will email it to those on my Torrance distribution list and post it on my web site with a quick note here.

That’s all for now. Enjoy your summer. It’s going fast.

Don

This post was prompted by a student’s question. She had a group of pictures she had added captions using Photoshop Elements. She wanted to make a CD for a friend that would contain the pictures and their captions. The problem was that using Share >  CD/DVD did copy the captions, but they were not visible using Windows XP Explorer.  The captions are there, but not easily seen by Windows Explorer. She knew she could make  a slide show that would display her captions and would even allow her to adjust their style and location. But she did not want to go to that trouble.

To be honest, after exchanging a couple of emails, I failed to give her a better way to do what she wanted than to make a slide show. Later it struck me that there was at least one alternative. Make an Online Album and save it to a CD. We generally do not cover this in my classes. Maybe we should, and I might include it in the future.

For now, I decided to make a video tutorial showing how to make the CD and then effectively play it back. The video runs for about 19 minutes. To watch the video, Click Here. After several seconds, it should begin to play. If you have trouble viewing it let me know by posting a comment below.

By the way, those of you reading this who are former students, both the South Bay Adult School and Torrance Adult Center are beginning formulate their plans for the fall term. I should have some news with regards to the classes I will be teaching at the two schools in a couple of weeks or so.  Stay tuned.

Until next time,

Don

Are you backing up your pictures and your Photoshop Elements Catalog? Are you using the PSE Backup command, or some other software program to this? Some of my students, especially those that are new to PSE are doing little to protect their images from either a hard disk crash or some kind of virus. Both can strike without warning. If you have never experienced either one of these catastrophes, you will.

I personally use the PSE Backup command to do my backups. This command not only backs up all of my pictures, audio files, and videos, but also the Catalog file that is the heart of PSE’s Organizer. The number of pictures in my catalog is rapidly approaching 23,000. There are a lot of memories contained in those photos. My ability to find any given picture within 1-2 minutes using the Categories, Sub-Categories, and Tags I have assigned them over the years is critical to me. It’s the Catalog file that contains all of this information about my pictures, including the link as to where a given image is stored on my computer.

I have been using the built-in Background command since it became available in PSE 3. It has worked well for me, and on more than one occasion, its companion command Restore prevented an inconvenience from becoming a disaster. This command can also be used when moving your pictures and Catalog to a new computer. I wrote a couple of articles here about a year ago discussing the Backup and Restore commands. Click here.

Many of my students are backing up their pictures and other data using dedicated backup software that may run automatically. In general, this is a very good approach. However, when I ask them if they are backing up their Catalog file with their chosen program, they normally can’t tell me. The Catalog file is absolutely essential if you ever have to recover your pictures and get the Organizer working properly again. This file holds the pointers to the physical location of your pictures, all of the category, sub-category, and tag assignments, as well as all of the other information you or PSE has generated about your pictures.

Most of us, don’t even know where this file is stored. However, it is easy to find this out right from within the program. From the Organizer’s Menu, click on Help > System Info. A screen like the figure below will be displayed. You can print it or copy it to a document. As you can see, it contains a lot of useful information in addition to the location of the Catalog file.

The Catalog file is not a large file. It does not contain your pictures, just the critical information about them. In my case, my Catalog file is only 89 Mb. This is for my catalog that contains almost 23,000 images and takes about 115 Gb of storage space to back up.

So what does all this mean to you? Well, if you are not doing any backups now, you should do one immediately using the built-in Backup Command in PSE. If you are already backing up your computer with other software, verify that the Catalog file is included. If it is not add it to the list of folders/files being backed up, or at least routinely back it separately.

One final suggestion, if you are having trouble with your computer and have it repaired by technician, make sure they are aware of this important file. I have helped several people get PSE running properly again, after they had their PC worked on. Although all of their pictures were recovered, PSE could not find them, because the Catalog file itself was not properly restored.

Until next time,

Don

Yesterday I went to upload some recent pictures from my Canon XTi’s memory card into the Photoshop Elements 7’s Organizer. This is very routine for me having done it hundreds of times.  This time things did not go as expected.

To begin with, I had become lazy and had not emptied my card for some time, although I had previously uploaded all but the most recent batch of photos. In fact, my card had almost 600 images with about 2.5 Gb of its 4 Gb capacity was filed.

As I proceeded to upload the images using File > Get Photos and Videos > From Camera or Card Reader, things went smoothly at first. The memory card was quickly previewed but then I noticed that the actual preview thumbnails were not being generated at some point.  I had seen PSE slow down generating thumbnails in the past, especially if I had a lot of RAW files, but never this bad.

But, I proceeded to the next step, and clicked on the Get Photos button. Nothing happened. PSE 7 had stpped wotking. I had to exit PSE via the Task Manager. I tried multiple times using different card readers with the same results. I began to worry, and was thankful that I had previuosly uploaded the vast majority of the images. But I did not want to lose my recent batch.

At first I thought maybe I was trying to upload too many from the card. Since I had uploaded most of them already, I decided to erase a bunch of them manually from within my camera. I quickly abandoned that approach. I can only do one at a time, or erase them all  and it was going to take a lot of concentration and time to delete them without inadvertently clicking on the Erase All button in my camera.

I then used Windows Explorer to copy the pictures to a folder. I was able to do this. As I was randomly opening the images with Windows Explorer, I clicked on the last picture I had taken, and it had an error that prevented it from being opened. I also noticed, its file size was somewhat smaller.

I put the card back into my camera and deleted that image, the last one I had taken. I put the card back in the reader and proceeded to upload the images using the Get command of PSE 7’s Organizer without any problems. 

I then wondered why that last image was bad. It obviously brought PSE 7 to its knees. Then I remembered. I was shooting RAW,  and my camera takes a few seconds to transfer the RAW image to my memory card. I do not have a high speed memory card. I remember that after shooting the last image, I immediately turned my camera off. I suspect it was in the middle of closing the file and for whatever reason it did not properly complete that operation before shutting down.  

Just to be on the safe side, I reformatted my memory card in my camera rather than just erasing the images. Many people recommend doing this all of the time anyway,  rather than just erasing the images from the card.

So, don’t be in such a hurry to shut your camera off after taking that last shot. That may not have caused the problem, I am not going to take any chances in the future.