Photoshop Elements 3 The Organizer

Transcription

1 Photoshop Elements 3 The Organizer The Organizer is a separate Photoshop Elements program, which you can use to keep track of your photos, organize your pictures into collections, and label them with tags. I don t use the Organizer much because it is slow to load and time-consuming to use, especially if you take a lot of photographs. There are a few things that the organizer does well, though. This lesson will focus on them. You also will learn a simple way to save image files for display on the web or to send as attachments. Saving Image Files for the Web Do this section even if you already know how. We need the images for the next part of the lesson. When preparing images for printing we usually want high resolution PSD or TIFF files so the print we produce will be of high quality. This produces large files, but generally we do not care because computer memory is cheap. When preparing images for web pages or attachments, we definitely need to worry about file and image size. Putting a 3000 x 2000 image on a web page is foolish when it will be displayed on a 1024 x 768 monitor, for example. Similarly, sending a 10 MB PSD file as an attachment probably will fail because it exceeds the allowable size for many, if not most, people s mailboxes. Small compressed files are the norm for web pages and . Photoshop Elements has a convenient menu option that makes it easy to save files for the web. Open Old_Main.jpg, a 2048x1536 image that is over 1 MB in size. We want to save this file for use on a web page. Select File, Save for Web from the main menu. 1

2 You will see matching portions of two pictures in the Save for Web window. The left portion is from the original picture and the right portion is from the copy that will be modified for the web. Use the Hand tool to move the images around until the portions you see have the detail and color you will need to judge how good the modified image is. First, set the image type and compression level you want. You almost always want to save a photo as a JPG image. Let s try a Medium quality image, which usually is fine. Next choose the size of the modified image. We decide to reduce it to 25% of its original size. After you have entered 25 in the Percent box, click on Apply. As you make these changes, the file size (31.2 K in this case) and type (JPG) are shown under the images. When you are satisfied with the modified image, click on OK. You will be asked where you want to save the file. 2

3 Save the image in the My Pictures folder in My Documents. Use Save for the Web to save the three pictures below as images suitable for display on a web page: Capitol.jpg Grief.jpg Park.jpg In each case choose a New Size that makes largest dimension of the image about 500 pixels. Save the pictures in the My Pictures folder in My Documents We now will create a Photo Gallery on your web page displaying these four files. Web Photo Gallery After you have saved your image files so that they are suitable for display on a web page, you may want to out them up on your personal web site for your family and friends to see. Click on the Photo Browser icon at the top of the Elements window. It may take some time, but eventually you will see the Organizer window. Depending on how many pictures you have worked with, there could be a lot of images in the Organizer s Catalog, thumbnails of which show on the screen. 3

4 Deleting Files in the Organizer Catalog The first thing we need to do is delete all the files in the Organizer Catalog to clean it out. Choose Edit, Select All from the Organizer menu. Press the Delete key on the keyboard. You will be asked to confirm the deletion from the Catalog. Make sure that the box in front of Also delete selected items from the hard disk is unchecked. Click on OK. You should see all the thumbnail images disappear from the Catalog. Getting New Images for the Organizer Catalog We now want to load the four images you saved for the web on page 2 of this lesson. Choose File, Get Photos, From Files and Folders from the Organizer menu. 4

5 The Get Photos from Files and Folders window probably will look in your My Pictures folder. If not, then move to that folder. Holding down the Ctrl key, click on the four image files to select them. When they have been selected, click on Get Photos. Soon you should see that the images you selected have been placed in the Organizer Catalog. Creating a New Web Photo Gallery Now that you have selected the files for your Web Photo Gallery, you need to create the web pages for the gallery. Choose File, New, Web Photo Gallery from the Organizer menu. 5

6 This will display the Web Photo Gallery window. The files that you placed in the Organizer Catalog should be displayed on the left. Change the title of the Photo Gallery web page to My Web Photo Gallery. You can add a subtitle if you like your name for example. Do not supply your address. Spammers harvest addresses from web pages. You can choose the Gallery Style from the menu. 6

7 You need to tell Elements where the web page and images should reside. You do this by supplying a Path for the web server hosting the web site and a Site Folder in which the web page files will be placed. Click on Browse to specify the path. In the Browse for Folder window, choose your W: drive and click on OK. This will set the Path to W:. Enter WebPhotos in the Site Folder: box and click on Save. Before long you should see the Photo Gallery you have created. Clicking on the thumbnails will display a full-size image. 7

8 Viewing your Photo Gallery Open a Web Browser, such as Internet Explorer, and enter the following as the URL: where studentim is your username You should see the Photo Gallery web page. You can do this for your own photographs so your friends and family can see them. Making Contact Sheets Darkroom photographers arrange strips of their negatives on a piece of photo paper and print a copy to retain a record of the negatives. The sheets of paper with small images from the negatives are called contact sheets. You can use Photoshop Elements to prepare contact sheets of image files if you like. Because the main object of contact sheets is to keep a record of photos, it is cheaper and more convenient to print them using a laser printer rather than photo printer. Click on the Photo Browser icon at the top of the Elements window. 8

9 Eventually you will see the Organizer window. Delete any files that are in the Organize catalog as described on page 4. Get thirteen images from your directory on the X: drive. The method for getting new images for the organizer catalog is described on pages 4 and 5. It doesn t matter which images you choose. Choose File, Print from the Organizer main menu. In the Print Photos window, specify Contact Sheet as type of print. Make sure that all three Text Labels (Date, Caption, and Filename) are checked. Select the number of Columns you want in the layout. The picture in the center illustrates what the contact sheet will look like. Select the printer. For this lesson, choose the laser printer in Olin 212. Click on Print to print the contact sheet. 9

10 Creating a Wall Calendar One of the more interesting aspects of the Organizer is the availability of the Photo Creation work space, which will allow you to create wall calendars, photo albums, and slide shows. In this part of the lesson, you will learn how to create a wall calendar. If you already have not done so, open the Organizer and load thirteen image files into the Catalog, as described on page 9. Click on the Create icon. Choose Wall Calendar from the Creation Setup menu and click on OK. In the next window, select the Style of the calendar and the Options for what is displayed on the calendar. Click on Next Step when you are ready. 10

11 At this point, you may see a warning about some of the images not being high resolution. This is because the images we are using for the lessons are relatively small. When you are making an actual calendar, you should use PSD images that have not been reduced in size. The next window will allow you to arrange the photos in the order you want them on the calendar. Note that each image is labeled with a month. In the Options section of the previous window, I also checked Title, so the first image will be a title page for the calendar. If you would like to arrange the images in a different order, you can. To move an image to a different month on the calendar, grab it with the mouse and pull it where you want. When you are through arranging the images, click on Next Step. 11

12 Now you can Customize the calendar. Suppose, for example, that you want text along with the picture on the Title Page. Double-click on the Double-Click to Insert Title box. You can type in the title, change the font characteristics, and move the title around on the title page. When you are finished, click on Done. You can move between pages by clicking on the Forward and Backward buttons. This allows you to make modifications in the pages, such as changing the size of the pictures. When you are finished, click on Next Step at the bottom of the page. 12

13 You can save the calendar so that it can be modified later. After you have entered a name, click on Save. In the next window, you can print the calendar or save it as a PDF file. Don t do this today no use wasting paper. 13

14 Creating a Slide Show Another thing you can do in the Photo Creation work space is create a slide show of a set of images. The slide show will be saved as a PDF file so that it can be viewed with an Adobe Reader. If you already have not done so, open the Organizer and load thirteen image files into the Catalog, as described on page 9. Click on the Create icon. In the Creation Setup window, select Slide Show from the menu and click on OK. Select a Simple Slide Show and click on OK. 14

15 Click on Add Photos. In the Add Photos window, select Add Photos From Photo Browser. Put a check mark by the images you want in the slide show and then click on Add Selected Photos. Then click on OK. Select the Duration of each image in the show, the type of Transition, and whether you want the show to Loop back to the beginning after the last slide. When you are finished, click on Save. At this point, the slide show should appear on the screen. I probably am missing something, but in my experience is that it does not move automatically from slide to slide though. It will move to the next slide if you click on the screen. 15

16 Press the Esc key to stop the show. Click on the Picture Tasks icon at the top of the Adobe Reader window and choose Export to Slideshow from the menu. In the Export to Slideshow window, click on Select All to select all the pictures. Change the preferences if you like and then click on Export. After you save the file, you should see the slide show. 16