Digital Journal — Digital photography can definitely be a case of having too much of a good thing. It’s great to be able to point and shoot to your heart’s content without fear of running out of film. The downside, though, is that you will probably wind up with a hard disk full of digital photos that you somehow never find time to organize.
If you need to forge some order out of the chaos of your multi-gigabyte digital photo collection, Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 may be just the thing for you. The latest version of this two-in-one application, which combines elements of the full-blown Photoshop editing software and Photoshop Album, provides prolific shutterbugs with a tool for organizing, enhancing and presenting their work.
With the 2,800 digital images I have scattered all over my PC, I first decided to take a look at the “Organizer” module of Elements 4.0. The program displayed thumbnails incredibly fast as it processed my photos, however it took almost 16 minutes for it to finish adding all the photos to a catalogue — a reminder that, even with today’s fast CPUs and hard disks, there will always be occasion to step away from your workstation for a cup of coffee.
The wait was worth it, though; displayed on my “Photo Browser” screen (the program’s default view) were crisp-looking thumbnails, arranged according to date. Even snippets of video that had been included in my photo folders were included in the catalogue. The sorting by date provided me with one way to get a handle on the tons of photos stored on my computer. If I wanted to find a picture that I took last winter, for example, I could scroll over to the winter months, thus narrowing down my search. In addition, I could also use an even more visual “Date View” that displays a monthly calendar indicating the days on which I had taken pictures. This made it easy to find birthday shots, for example.
The most valuable organizational feature in Photoshop Elements 4.0 was its “tag” function. Tags — labels that can slapped onto a picture to make them easier to find later on — are displayed in a separate panel beside the main display window. The program provides default generic tags such as “Family”, “People”, and “Places”, but you can also add your own tags such as the names of family members or specific travel locations. You can then drag the appropriate tags onto the thumbnails to associate certain pictures with certain subjects (or you can right-click on a picture to apply an existing tag).
Much of the tagging process is still a manual effort, of course, but this latest version of Elements does offer help by way of a “Face Tagging” feature. This function attempts to isolate the faces within a group of pictures, so that you can quickly apply the appropriate “People” tags to them. I found that face tagging worked amazingly well despite the fact that the program algorithm also identified a couple of bicycle wheels and boat parts as faces.
After playing tag with my photo collection, I soon reaped the benefits of my simple organizational efforts. One click on the “Amsterdam” tag I created and all the pictures from my family’s Amsterdam vacation were displayed. Switching to the “Pets” tag, I quickly found all the photos of the family cat. What was more, I could even recall pictures with more than one tag — for example, selecting the “Amsterdam” and “biking” tags provided me with all my cycling pictures in that city. In fact, Photoshop Elements 4.0 provided me more ways to organize and search through my photos than I’ll probably ever need.
As if tags were not enough, I also had the option of typing in captions for every photo, then doing a search based on captions later on. If I were so inclined, I could also have created “Collections” — sets of photos based on a certain theme such as “Vacations”.
Elements 4.0 has phenomenal organizing functions, but organization is just the first step for a photo enthusiast. How about those shots that need a little boost — that back-lit photo that leaves faces in the dark, or the dull-looking picture that doesn’t convey the brilliance of the original scene? That’s where the Photoshop part of this package comes in: in the two “Editor” modules, there’s a plethora of tools for enhancing your pictures. These tools can be as simple as the “automatic” functions — automatic fixing of red-eye, brightness and contrast adjustments, etc. — and as sophisticated as a “Magic Selection Brush” that lets you specify just the parts of the photo that you want to play around with.
In my case, a few judicious mouse clicks in the “Quick Fix” module were all I needed to improve my photos. A quick fix is important for anyone who hasn’t yet grasped the concepts of layers, brushes and gradients. However, with the diversity of this program, Photoshop experts, graphic artists and practiced photo editors will still have considerable power at their fingertips when using this package’s “Standard Edit” mode. New features for photo experts include the “Magic Extractor” which lets you remove subjects from photos. This makes for great composite photos and powerful image manipulation.
Finally, when you’ve organized and enhanced your photos, Photoshop Elements 4.0 also provides several ways of showing them off to the world. The good ol’ slideshow is one way to go and this program provides fairly standard options for setting the types of transitions, musical accompaniment and narration. You can even turn your slideshow into a WMV file that will play in the Windows Media Player, or burn it onto a CD.
The program also makes it very easy to send your photos to your audience via the Internet. For one thing, there’s a built-in function that lets you email a photo to your contacts without even running your default email program. You have the choice of sending a picture as an attachment or embedding it into the email message itself (complete with borders and other accoutrements). Yet another function lets you post your photos on the online photo-sharing site, Kodak Easyshare Gallery.
The future looks bright for this latest version of Elements, but if there is what you might call a dark cloud here somewhere, it would probably be the overhead: I’m not talking about the cost of the package — which has been pegged attractively at just under $100 (US) — but your system resources that may feel the pinch. O my 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB of memory, I felt that Elements took quite a bit of time to load up. As with other Adobe products such as Acrobat (or even the Acrobat Reader), you’re treated to the sight of a long list of plug-ins being loaded when you start the program. Likewise, switching from one module to the other was sometimes grueling on my patience level.
On the whole, though, the remarkable power and ease of use make Photoshop Elements 4.0 well worth looking into. If you’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on your camera, Photoshop Elements 4.0 is a one good way to make sure that you get the most for your digital photography dollar.
Having tried out this program, I for one am not willing to go back to a primitive existence with Microsoft’s prehistoric Windows XP Camera Wizard and Picture and Fax Viewer.
