Sarasota PC Monitor
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 (Part 1)
A Software Review
bySharon Rump
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.Today it seems that digital is the name of the game and Adobe continues to be one of the forerunners who always comes in first at the finish line. I have been using their software products for a number of years and continue to upgrade as new versions are created and am always impressed on how they can improve on an already good product.
While I have been using the full version of Photoshop since version 5.5, I have also had the Elements versions on my computer also. With the latest release of Photoshop Elements 3.0 there is less reason for the average person to need the power of Photoshop CS as there are so many features included in 3.0 and the program is a lot more user friendly than CS.
Upon opening the box I was a bit disappointed with what I found. I have been impressed for many years at the quality of the user manual that Adobe had continued to include with their software while other companies had scaled back to a small booklet to get you started. Unfortunately, Adobe has taken a step backward at this time and included a small Getting Started booklet of 65 pages. There is no way that you can effectively learn how to use a program of this strength with such a small guide.
It is correctly called "Getting Started" as it will give you a head start to learning but then lets you sit there on your own. You do have access to their help menus but I always find them harder to work with. I like to have a manual in front of me so that I can follow along as I learn. Fortunately for me, I was able to obtain some aftermarket books which are reviewed separately from this article.
The program was easy to install as is the case with most software these days. In no time I was ready to jump in and begin.
Elements 3.0 is really a combination of two programs. Adobe had created a Photoshop Album that was separate from their Photoshop Elements program. Now both programs are together which gives you a complete solution from the beginning where you transfer the images to your computer until you are ready with the finished image for printing, sharing or creating one of many projects that are included.
When you first open the program you will see the Welcome Screen which allows you access to the different areas of Elements. As you hover over each icon you will see a screen which fully explains what you do in that area.
The program is divided into to two modules with different functions. The first one is the Organizer which is the area that helps you get the images loaded on your system and organizes them for easy access in the future. You create a catalog of all of the images on your hard drive and then view them with different options. The easiest for me was the date view. All of the images are in the Photo Browser by the date they were taken and a timeline appears across the top of the screen with a bar graph to indicate how many photos were taken each month. You can also switch to a calendar view which will show the days of the month and indicate which days had photos taken. You can click on an individual date and see all of the photos associated with it.
You can add "tags" to the images which will allow you to further organize your images. There are a number of tags included in the program but you can create as many of your own as you would like and even add a personalized thumbnail to the tag to make it easier to identify. This is a long process if you have a lot of images already on your hard drive, but well worth the effort. After you have accomplished this, when images are added you can add tags at that time so they are all organized. You can add multiple tags to images also. You can then do a search on your files to find images with a particular tag on it. It is important to remember that when this catalog is created, only information relating to the location of the image is stored. There is not a duplicate image created for the organizing process. This is important to consider if you need to move images from their original location after they have been put in the catalog.
There are many different ways to get images on to your computer and Elements helps make this easier for you. You can import photos from your camera, a memory card, a scanner or a mobile phone camera. You can also import audio and video clips to include in the organizer.
Another feature of the organizer is the ability to create stacks, versions and collections. Stacks literally stack the thumbnail of images that are similar on top of each other to save space and eliminate having a lot of almost identical images in the organizer. Versions are created when you edit an image and have several different files of the same image with different edits. Collections allow you to group photos for a particular purpose. You can combine many different photos of an individual or an event that you want to work with for a particular project. The original photos are not moved from their location of your hard drive, you just view them together in the photo browser. You can also add captions and notes to photos in the browser which are then associated with the individual photo and are an aid when searching for images. There is also a compare feature which will let you compare two photos next to each other which can be very useful when you are trying to choose the best image of several photos.
While most editing is done in the Editor module, there is also an Auto Fix window which will allow you to make some quick adjustments from within the Organizer module.
Part 2 of this review will continue in the March issue and will feature the editor module of Photoshop Elements 3. :
Copyright 2005. This article is from the February 2005 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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