Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0: Installing and Setup
Adobe is one of the largest photo editing software companies. They have such a broad range of programs and prices for photo, digital and now even video editing software. Newest in the field of photo editing is the just released Photoshop Elements 4.0. It has a wide range of photo editing, organizing and presentation features that you can spend many hours of fun with your favorite digital photos.
Photoshop Elements 4.0 costs about $100 at most stores but you can find it at Walmart for $80. If there are any sales or rebates I would say to go for it. The program is new and will probably not be going on sale for awhile. The program is also available in a bundle package with the video editing software Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. I found prices for this package at $150, you might wait to see if Walmart will be selling this sometime soon if you would like this package deal.
I bought the program because I was tired of the limitations of the cheaper programs I had purchased in the past. I had limited my cost for other editing programs to around $50 and wound up with what I paid for. I had last purchased a program more than a year ago and there were things that I and my wife wanted to do with our pictures that we just could not do with the other programs. Now we can, and so much more.
When you first load the program which is pretty easy, just follow the few questions in the setup. You will have to restart the computer and open it again, it will first open to it’s welcome screen. I suggest you start the photo organizer and load all your computers pictures into it to start, and go do the dishes or watch some TV. The program takes awhile to load all the pictures on your computer, depending on how many you have. It will ask you to search your computer or just parts of it for pictures to add to the photo organizer. I suggest and recommend to just do all the hard drives on your system to search for pictures. It will take longer but the program will then have any pictures, even ones that are part of games or other programs in one handy place.
You just need to make sure that you or whoever uses the program does not alter and then save any pictures from games or other programs that use those pictures as part of another program. Save any altered pictures in a new location and with a new name to make sure you don’t save over ones those programs need. For instance when I look through the pictures I find all kinds of maps and pictures of stuff for parts of a game I recently bought, Half Life 2. If I altered any of these and then saved them back to their original location the game might be messed up because of it. And then again I can already see some interesting fun with some of these pictures and other things. For instance I now have a handy way to look at all the maps that are a part of these games with out having to go to an editor for the game.
The photo organizer automatically loads and sorts the pictures you have by date, and it can be a lot of pictures. I loaded the program on my desktop and found out I had over 7000 pictures on it. I knew I had a lot but not that many. For games there are things like icons and splash screens so that accounts for some, then my wife takes a lot of pictures for her daycare, the kids and special events with them. My kids are in 4-H and they take a lot of pictures of the things they do, projects and the fairs. Vacations, family holidays and all the other things we have in digital format are now organized by the date they were put on the computer in one easy to find place.
When you go to use Photoshop Elements there are three areas of the program it can start up in; the welcome screen which you can then go to any of the various areas for, the photo editor or the photo organizer. The last two are probably the most used areas of the program so they gave those two as separate options. In the welcome screen you can go to those two areas or a few of the others. There are several different areas of the program and for using the editor that you can go to from the welcome screen. Product overview, organizer, quick editor, editor, photo presentation and blank editor to create from scratch a photo creation. There is also some tutorials on this page for you to learn how to use each section of the program from Adobe.
The organizer is probably one of the best and handiest ways to use the program when you are finding and editing photos you have downloaded from a camera, disk or the Internet. Across the top of the organizer is a bar graph showing a representation of the dates the pictures were edited or saved on the computer. If you know about when a picture was saved you can quickly search there or just scroll down the page of all your photos. You can also organize them by attaching tags to any photos you want. You can organize the photos with these tags by favorites, hidden, people, places, events or others. You can make up your own tag categories or sub categories and add them to this list to organize the pictures however you want.
You can also create what is called a collection, a totally different area to save and organize photos that is separate from the main area. This is kind of like a photo album where you can group photos to keep them separate from the other groups on your computer.
From this organizer you can download photos from your camera or scanner and even order photos from Kodak’s website. Those special family photos or favorite pet pics can be professionally printed and sent to you via snail mail for a reasonable cost. You can go here for more information of this service: http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/services_overview.html#orderprints .
The editor for photos can be as easy or as detailed as you would like to get into it, and I suppose I’ll just have to get into it. I have a lot of photos I want to do things with. There are simple tools such as one step touch up which will automatically enhance a photo or simple red eye reduction. Then there are whole areas of the more complex tools that I still have to get into. The program is a better way not only to edit and enhance photos but is definitely a very good photo organizer and I have not even gotten into the presentation portions of the program yet.
Well, more to come on the other parts of Adobe’s newest Photoshop Elements 4.0.
