You’ve taken masses of photos with your digital camera and they are stashed away on your hard drive of your Mac where nobody can see them. Does this sound familiar? Do your photos need organising and editing but you don’t know where to begin? This article aims to provide some recommendations to help you get started in digital photo editing with Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0.
To start with you will need a digital photo editing program. I personally recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0. This version is compatible with all G-series as well as the new Intel Macs. Photoshop Elements is an easier to use version of the professional Adobe Photoshop software. Since it is aimed at the home digital photo enthusiast, Elements carries out basic photo editing tasks promptly and effortlessly and includes many sophisticated Photoshop features which are available to you at the click of a mouse.
The user interface is well laid out and easy to understand; Elements includes a great feature for the digital photo editing beginner, the use of descriptive icons, where you hover your mouse over an icon and message pops up with a description of its function. Organizing your photos is a snap as well since Elements allows you to manage, sort, delete and view your picture collection in a variety of different ways including face tagging and keyword tagging. There is also an exhaustive list of file properties for each of your images so misplacing photos will be a thing of the past. Since there is a partnership between Adobe and Kodak you the opportunity to share your photos online, print greetings cards, custom calendars or photo books. A quick note: before you eject the install cd you want to make sure you copy the Goodies folder to your hard drive – it contains a huge variety of frames, backgrounds and extras to play around with.
With Quick Fix you can perform basic editing functions to correct the most common digital photo flaws in one handy location. With a couple of clicks, smart fix and auto red-eye removal will give you an image that is ready to print. More handy functions are the skin tone adjustment tool, which makes skin tones appear more life-like and the straighten tool which gives you the ability to straighten and crop crooked photos. A couple of more advanced features which are very cool are the magic selection brush and magic extractor tool – I use them a lot in Photoshop CS2 and was extremely impressed with how they performed in Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0. With the magic selection brush, you scribble on an object and, providing there is enough contrast between it and the background, Elements will select it for you. The magic extractor is even better; it is simple to operate and allows you to separate objects from the background of an image in seconds extremely accurately (this works better than the extract function in the full-priced Photoshop CS2 – but don’t tell anyone I told you!).
So, for the beginner or more advanced user alike, if you want to edit your photos quickly and easily with the minimum of fuss, and get them off your hard drive for people to see, Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0 offers all the functionality you’ll ever need and is excellent value for money.
