Photoshop Elements lets you do practically anything you want to your digital images. You can colorize black-and-white photos, remove demonic red-eye stares, or distort the facial features of people who’ve been mean to you. The downside is that all those options can make it tough to find your way around Elements, especially if you’re new to the program.
This chapter helps get you oriented. You’ll learn what to expect when you launch the program, how to use Elements to fix photos with just a couple of keystrokes, and how to sign up for and connect to all the goodies that await you on Photoshop.com. You’ll also learn how to use Guided Edit mode to get started editing your photos. Along the way, you’ll find out about some of Elements’ basic controls and how to get to the program’s Help files.
Unlike the past several versions of Elements, with Elements 10 there’s not much difference in how you start up the program, regardless of whether you have a Mac or a Windows computer.
When you install Elements in Windows, the installer creates a desktop shortcut for you. Just double click that to launch Elements.
In the Mac version, you can launch Elements as the last step in the installation process (Beyond This Book explains how to install Elements), or you can go to Applications→Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and double-click its icon there. (Incidentally, the only other thing in there besides the uninstaller is a folder called Support Files [you won’t see this if you have the App Store version]. That’s where you’ll find the actual Editor application.) If you want to make a Dock icon for future convenience, start Elements and then go to the Dock and click its icon. Keep holding the mouse button down till you see a menu, and then choose Options→Keep in Dock.
Note
If you don’t care for Elements’ dark color scheme, unfortunately you’re out of luck in Elements 10. While some previous versions gave you a way to choose a lighter color for the background of the program’s windows, this is gone from Elements now. On the plus side, the contrast between the program’s background and the text on it is a bit better than in previous versions.
When you launch Elements for the first time, you’re greeted by the Welcome screen (Figure 1-1). This is where you sign up for your free Photoshop.com account (which you can only get if you live in the U.S.; Photoshop.com explains how), which also registers Elements. (If you have a Mac, you also have the option to create your account while installing Elements, as well as doing that here.)
Note
The App Store version has no Welcome Screen and no option for a free Photoshop.com account. When you launch this version, you go straight to the Editor (Editing Your Photos).
Figure 1-1. Elements’ Welcome screen. What you see in the right part of the window changes occasionally, so it may not exactly match this image. The left part of the window is always the same, though; it’s where you choose whether to organize or edit photos. The bottom of the screen has links for signing into your Photoshop.com account, if you have one. You can’t bypass the Welcome screen just by clicking the upper-right Close (X) button. If you do that, this screen goes away—but so does Elements. Fortunately, the box on page 18 tells you how to permanently say goodbye to this screen.
The Welcome screen is a launchpad that lets you choose which part of Elements you want to use:
You can easily hop back and forth between the Editor and the Organizer—which you can think of as the two halves of Elements—and you probably won’t do much in one without eventually needing to get into the other. But in some ways, they function as two separate programs. For example, if you start in the Organizer, then once you’ve picked a photo to edit, you have to wait a few seconds while the Editor loads. And when you have both the Editor and the Organizer running, quitting the Editor doesn’t close the Organizer—you have to close both parts of Elements independently.
In the upper-right part of the Editor’s main window is a button that you can click to launch the Organizer or switch over to it if it’s already running. Click the word “Organizer” or the dark blue square with four smaller light blue squares on it. If you want to do the opposite—get photos from the Organizer to the Editor—select the photo(s) and then either right-click/Control-click one of the selected thumbnails and choose “Edit with Photoshop Elements;” go to Fix→Edit Photos; or click the down arrow to the right of the word “Fix” and choose Full, Quick, or Guided Edit. Whichever method you use, your photo(s) appear in the Editor so you can work on them. Once both programs are running, you can also just click the Editor’s or the Organizer’s icon in the Windows taskbar or the Mac Dock to switch from one to the other.
One helpful thing to keep in mind is that Adobe built Elements around the assumption that most people work on their photos in the following way: First, you bring photos into the Organizer to sort and keep track of them. Then, you open photos in the Editor to work on them and save them back to the Organizer when you’ve finished making changes. You can work differently, of course—by opening photos directly in the Editor and bypassing the Organizer altogether, for example—but you may feel like you’re always swimming against the current if you choose a different workflow. (The next chapter has a few hints for disabling some of Elements’ features if you find they’re getting in your way.)
The Welcome screen can also serve as your connecting point for signing onto Photoshop.com. Photoshop.com has more about this website, but for now you just need to know that a basic account is free if you’re in the United States (it’s not available in other countries), and it gives you access to all the interesting features in Elements that require an Internet connection.
If you’re already signed into Photoshop.com, you can see how much of your online storage you’ve already used by looking at the graph at the bottom of the Welcome screen. There’s also a reminder of your personal URL at Photoshop.com and links to online help, tips, and tricks for using Elements. However, you can also get to all these things from within the Editor or the Organizer, so there’s no need to keep the Welcome screen around just for that. The box below explains how to get rid of the Welcome Screen.