Getting back your missing files using Reconnect feature in Elements Organizer

A lot of times, while cleaning up my PC, I do not have Elements Organizer open and I end up moving folders, renaming folders and files  without realizing that these folders are imported to my Organizer catalog and since I am not moving them from Organizer itself, i might end up making my cataloged files go missing.

Though I very much prefer to do these folder renames, movements, file renames through Elements Organizer so that it knows the latest path of all my media and files never go missing but I have never been the best Organizer. But thanks to Elements' Reconnect feature which looks for all my missing files in my catalog and auto reconnects them wherever they have been roaming on my system.It is a very useful concept as I have not seen any Photo Organizer providing this auto function.

So for newbies, let me explain  the concept.
I have some images which are in Elements catalog staying on my hard drive at say location C:\My pictures\Santacruz trip . Some day, I moved these files from my hard drive to \My Pictures\Family Pictures\Santacruz trip. However when I opened Elements Organizer catalog, I realized, the photos of this trip show "?" icon on thumbnail as they went missing because I moved them to some other location or may be just renamed the files. As soon as I do any operation on these pictures, Elements tries to auto reconnect them and find where are they now on my hard drive. Or you may just browse to the folder were you moved(if you know the location). On connecting one file of a folder, it reconnects all of that folder itself. One does not need to reconnect each file.

Or you can simply go to File>Reconnect >All missing Files. This is small yet very useful functionality which at times saves a lot of your time in organizing your media.

I hope you would find this tip useful in organizing your photos using Elements.

Awesomeness of "Watch Folders" in Photoshop Elements Organizer

Watch Folders : This functionality is a little hidden in Elements Organizer (File>Watch Folders) and not many know about it usefulness. It is one quick way to get media into your Organizer catalog without bothering about manually importing into it.

To use it, just make the parent folder (of all your photo folders) as the watch folder and it auto imports the media  into your Organizer catalog. As soon as any new picture is added to your watch folder in windows explore or to any child of your watch folder, it would be auto-imported to your Organizer catalog.

For example, mostly all my pictures are dumped to one of following three folders (shown in screenshot).  So i have made all three as my watch folders. Hence I never need to import any media to my Organizer catalog.

Awesomeness is added if you say exchange photos or receive photos through dropbox. You can add dropbox as your watch folder. Hence all media comes to your Organizer catalog automatically.


 

I find this feature very useful as it saves a lot of my time. The dropbox idea was shared by one of the Elements user(Thanks Mellissa) and I really found it useful. So just thought to share this tip with everyone!

How to add shadow to an object or a person on ground using Adobe Photoshop Elements?

Here goes the tutorial for adding shadow to any human body or object such that the shadow is on the ground.

It's damn easy using Elements. So here goes the steps:

1. Choose your model. I chose my favorite one.

I could manage to extract the selection using refine edge tool  in Elements as described in Refine Edge  tutorial. I created a new layer out of this selection by right clicking and choosing- Layer via Copy.

2. Create another new blank layer using Control+Shift +N or through layers menu>New layer. Drag this layer below the selection layer we create in last step. Choose paint bucket tool from left tool panel, changing background color in color picker tool to white and then painting it over this new layer.

3. Created a copy of this layer by right clicking it in layer panel and choosing "Duplicate layer". Same can also be done by dragging this layer to new layer icon in layer palette or just using the shortcut "Control+J" on Win and "Cmd+J" on MAC.

4. Select this layer copy in layer palette and click on the thumbnail pressing COntrol key. This will select the model here.

Now select brush tool and keeping this new layer selected as shown, paint it over with black. Since the selection is ON, the brush won't paint outside the selection edges.

Here is what you see post that:

You can add a little  blur to this shadow layer from Filter>Blur>Gaussian blur.

5. Now we are just two steps away from the final result. Go to Image>Transform> Free Transform or  just press control+T, keeping top most layer we just painted as the one selected in Layers palette:

Keeping Control key pressed, move the edges of the transformation boundary such that the shadow part now goes towards the ground as shown. You can tweak the shadow in a way you want, imagining the source of light as per your needs. Click the green commit button when you see better placement. Make sure you now make the shadow layer as second by dragging it down otherwise your shadow will paint black over the body. So in order to make it behind the body, drag it below the selection layer.
One most important thing is that you must coincide the feet of person with the feet in shadow here while transforming else they would be disjoint and not look realistic or seem like person flying in the air :)

6. The last step is to reduce the opacity of the shadow. This can be done from layers paleete by selecting this layer and reducing opacity to something around 60-70% or as per your need.

Here goes my final result:

Shadow added using Adobe Photoshop Elements

I have been receiving suggestions from the readers of this blog about the content and some specific tutorial requests using Elements. Suggestions and feedback are welcome. I will try to respond as soon as I can.

How to create icons from images making background transparent?

To create icons from any of your images, making rest of the background as transparent, follow the steps below:

* Open the image in Photoshop Elements Editor.

* Select the Object using any of the selection tools suiting your needs. To understand how to make precise selections, you may visit the posts.

Selected the bird using quick selection tool

* Right click the selection and select Layer via Copy

* The layer panel now shows the selection in a separate layer.

* Delete the background layer in layers panel using right click option. And here is I see the Bird with transparent background which I can save to be used as icon.

Is there a way to compare two photos in Elements Organizer?

I often hear from some PSE users that they miss photo Comparison mode in Elements Organizer.  However, a lot of us are not aware that the functionality is already there in Organizer. Yeah it's bit hidden though.

It's an important functionality when you want to compare two pictures, may be want to select one of them to keep. Also if images are shot in multi-burst modes and there are minute differences in those shost and you want to zoom them together and compare those minute details to select the best one.

Two ways to access this functionality:

1st Way:

Select two or more pictures, press F12. Oh! great there is a shortcut :-)

2nd Way:

Select multiple files, go to View>Full Screen> Click on the icon at the bottom bar. You may choose either of the options- to view images side by side or top-bottom.

You get to see the images in "Compare mode" so that you can compare any two pictures.

In Compare mode

Also you can select the small lock icon in bottom toolbar which syncronizes pan/zoom of both the images together. That means if I zoom in any one of the pictures say y mouse scroll, both of them will zoom with same level so that minute details of the images can be compared as well.

Hope you find this information useful!

How to edit IPTC metadata of multiple photos using PSE 11 Organizer?

PSE Editor provides a way to edit IPTC metadata of an image at a time. However, Organizer did not have a way to edit IPTC metadata till Elements 11 version. With PSE 11, Organizer provides a way to edit IPTC metadata of multiple photos at a time as well.

Here is how you can achieve that:

1. For a single image, select a file in Image grid in Organizer. Click on Information tab in right panel as shown, followed by expanding metadata panel as shown in the image below:

2. Click on the icon shown on right to view Complete metadata of the image selected.

3. Under IPTC header, select the button that shows 3 dots "..."

This launches the following dialog showing IPTC metadata fields. Fill in the metadata and Click Save.

The saved metadata should now appear in metadata panel under IPTC header. To edit this metadata, go to the same dialog with the same steps as above and you can then append or overwrite the existing metadata.

To edit metadata of multiple files, you just need to select multiple files in the image grid and select "Add IPTC information: button in Information panel :

The dialog you see for multiple files is a bit different as it provides a radio button option for Author and Keywords fields to overwrite or append existing values as shown. You can use these options as desired.

Click Save and here you go!

How to select hair with precision?

Selecting hair, cactus or other selections that requires precisions could not be as great result giving as after using the new Refine Edge feature in PSE 11 Editor. This is a feature that Elements has inherited from Photoshop.

Consider the picture below where I intend to select hair of this lady so that I can copy her to some other background. Open it in PSE 11 Editor.

 1. Select Quick Selection toolto select the lady and her hair.
Tip: Do not select the hair at or around narrow edges. So in such areas, selection would be on shrinked area than the actual hair spread as shown:

Selection should not be made near the narow edges of the hair, like as shown

 2. Now from task bar at bottom, click on the button Refine Edge or go to Select menu>Refine Edge.
The first dropdown lets you view the selection in different ways. I chose the one with White background so that I could see the black hair selected.

The selection is jaggy and does not include the edges and here it shows over white background

3. If selecting narrow strands of hair as in the picture, increase the radius under Edge detection. This value of radius depends on the hair to be selected. So a little experiments might be helpful. The value 50-70px may generally be good in case of such kind of hair selection. Though this value should not be too close to maximum as it may lead to some of the distortion in rest of the selected area by making some of the areas near the selection go transparent. This you would observe when we look at the layer mask generated in steps ahead.

4. Under Adjust Edge, you can play little with Smoothing, Feathering, Contrast and Shifting edge if required. I generally use Contrast and make it up by 5-10% for good results. But yes for sure, it depends on your image as well.
 One more point to be taken care is that the background color fringe appears near the edges. To avoid that, always select Decontaimate colors an increase the amount to 100%. It really pays good results.

In case you feel that there were areas of hair strands that you wanted in selection but they have not come into your results, make use of the brush and eraser tool on left to paint over such edges where those hair strands were present but havenot come into your selection. However while doing this you would not know where is that area as you currently do not see the original layer and hence cannot figure out seeing above as you cannot see the area which has not come into selection. So to do so, again click on View dropdown and select R to Reveal Layer which will show you the original. Switch back to the white background mode by clicking W or select again from dropdown and paint to teh areas where you have missed something in selection.

5. To work further on refining the results, you may prefer to select "New Layer with Layer Mask" in "Output To" dropdown so that you can work with layer mask in next step to enhance the selection.

6. Click Ok. Here is what you get to see:

You would observe on looking closely that some of the areas near the boundary of the arms and hair shows transparency. We will fix that using layer mask.

Alt+Click on the black and white layer mask in Layers palette.

Here is what you see:

Some of the areas look grey near the edges which needs to be painted with white

This clearly indicates that the details on outer area of arms and some of the hair are lost. That is, the area is not complete white where it should have been.

Let's select Brush tool from left. Change the Color Palette colro to White and paint those areas as white so that it looks like this:

Now Alt+Click on the image icon next to mask icon in layer palette to switch back to image mode again.
So here is my final selected image:

And here is how it looks when a drag a new background to this image from Graphics>Backgrounds panel:

Hope the tutorial helps!

What's new in the new version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 11?

There is alot new and exciting in the new version of Elements.
I thought to brief the set of these new features before I get onto sharing more tutorials on them.

Elements Organizer 11

The new version of Elements Organizer offers alot of usability improvements along with new features and new UI. The top level things you would notice when you launch the new version may be:

1. Better UI and  simplicity in workflows from previous versions. As most of us remember our pictures though the people in them, or the place where they were shot or the events associated them, the new Organizer is built on this concept and provides an easy way to organize the media by bringing in the different views that are: People, Places and Events and provides an immersive experience organizing your media.

Here is the quick preview of the new Elements Organizer 11

Elements Organizer 11

2. The new version allows media to be placed on Google maps and hence allowing organization through the Places. It's the first time ever Elements has integrated the Google maps.

3. Import to and Export from Adobe Revel: Media from Organizer catalog can interact with the Adobe Revel. So one can access the media stored on various devices like iPad, MAC and other machines etc in your Organizer catalog. Similarly export the media to your Adobe revel account from the Organizer catalog.

4. Auto suggestion of Events based on media timestamp for quick organization.

5. Auto organization through Flat folders. Alot of us do not want to spend alot of time creating albums and we generally tend to associate our media with the physical location on the disk and hence are more comfortable with using folders. Previous versions of Organizer lacked an ability to show the list of that folders only that have media imported in the catalog. Hence using folder view in Organizer was cumbersome as it used the get the complete folder hierarchy even if not needed. This version gives a quick access to your managed folders(from where media has been imported) and the tree as well if required.

6. Faster response with larger catalogs as compared to previous versions. There has been improvement in performance of launch of application, folder view(trememndously), and a few other areas like tagging, albums, full screen view etc.

Elements Editor 11 

A lot of new exciting features to give a try that includes:

1. New enhanced and simpler UI. Here is a screen that captures the new UI of Editor:

Elements Editor 11

2. New Guided Edits like high key and low key effects, Vignette effect.

Some examples with Before/After using these features:

Before High Key applied

After High key applied

Before Low key applied

After Low key applied

3. Enhancements in "Refine Edge" feature allowing more precise and natural selections for cases like selecting hair etc.

4. Some new filters that include Comic filter. An example output of comic filter:

5. Allows to add new effects/actions easily from other websites and blogs which allows you to create more creative content.


I hope you would find this summary of the new Elements version useful. I will soon share more about these in detail.

Introduction to PSE Organizer

I have got a few requests to update this blog with some tips and troubleshooting for Organizer application as well. So here comes my first post for Organizer.I have a pretty big catalog* of photos and videos (around 20K media items) in my Organizer and I personally find this application pretty useful when I am looking for something in particular.

What is Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer for?

PSE Organizer is a bundled application which comes with both the products- Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements. This application allows one to get your media from device like cameras/card reader/scanners/ external drives/internal drives, organize your media(photos and videos) by tags/albums/folders etc, review them in full screen or compare modes, do some quick edits, rebound some creations like Photo slideshow which can further be output as pdf or wmv, share your media with your family and friends.

PSE Organizer is a value addition when you have thousands of photos in your catalog. One fine morning you might just want to re-bond your old memories of 1980s. However, looking for any photos of any particular event on your numerous drives and folders may just upset you. Now how easy would that be with this application? It would be simple to search by event tags, people tags, date or place which you could remember about those photos infact any metadata like camera used, date etc. Organizer provides extensive search capabilities for photo metadata. Once you search through your photos and reach the ones which you wanted to see, in some simple clicks, you can share it on Flickr, Facebook or other sharing services with your family and friends. 

PSE Organizer 10 also allows you to search for visually similar photos, or search for photos with a particular object like a building, a pet or a flower. Sometimes I just want to look at all the pictures that I have shot of my dog. to get them all together among several thousands gets difficult. PSE 10 allow you to simply mark an object in one picture and search for that object in all of your pictures.

One great value addition personally for me was Duplicate detection in PSE 10. I shoot a lot of similar shots in different angles of a scene or subject. And many a times I take multi-burst shots, out of which I generally keep 2 out of 10 shots taken in multi-burst mode of my camera. However it gets really tiresome to manually go and delete the rest 8 and stack the 2 keepsakes. And specially if I took 600 shots in a trip. Duplicate photo detection feature in this version quickly suggests the duplicate images based on both parameters- vsiual similarity between the photos and time taken. It works great for multi-burst shots or if you have clicked your pictures with both jpeg and raw format settings in your camera. You can quickly cretae stacks of such image.

There are plenty of sharing options in Organizer like email attachments, designer emails, Facebook, Flickr, youtube for videos etc. Having a variety of sharing options at one place is a boon when you know which of your friends are on flickr and some of them just reside on FB and you want to share your photos/videos with your friends.

One great feature is Organizer is People recognition. It allows you to save your memories of people in life by organizing them by people recognition workflow. 

At any time if I feel to do any detailed edits, I can send my pictures to PSE Editor from Organizer and choose to keep both the version in the Organizer catalog.

One good feature in organizer i that you can create and manage multiple catalogs. So if you want to keep your personal pictures separately from your business ones, you can create separate catalogs altogether.

*catalog is a term used in this application which refers to the database that stores all references of your imported media in the Organizer along with its association with albums, tags, star rating, captions and other metadata.So whenever you organize your media with any of these metaphors, the information gets stored in database.

When I used Organizer for the first time and deleted files from my catalog, I thought I am deleting those files physically. Infact, it took me a little while to understand that Organizer shows you all your media in its grid but it is not storing media physically but it is just referencing my media with its physical location. So unless I specifically say "Delete from hard drive" while deleting files from Organizer, I am just removing the references of my media from the catalog.

There is a lot to explore in this application and since you deal with thousands of files altogether, it is natural to face more issues. Through this part of blog, I will also try to help with some troubleshooting steps for these kind of issues.

How to create picture stacks using PSE10?

The following two pictures illustrates the "Picture Stack" effect available in PSE10.

Original image

After Picture stack effect was added

This new feature in PSE 10 allows you to get this effect in a couple of minutes<probably less than that>.

Here are the steps :

1. Open the source image in Editor.
2. Go to Guided Edits
3. In the Photo Play category, select "Picture Stack"

2nd option in the category.

4. The next screen appears showing three steps :

In first step, you can choose the number of pictures in the stack you would like to see. The options are 4, 8, 12.

Once you select that, you can select border width of each photo frame. Teh three options are : Small, Medium and large.

The third ioption allows you to fill the background areas which are shown behind the frames with a solid color or gradient.

In these three clicks your output is ready.


However you may tweak the results like rotating any picture stack or moving it to a different orientation etc in the Full edit.

Select the Move tool in full edit and use it for moving any picture stack to a different position and commit the operation.

Once commited, the result would appear as shown :

Final result

Let me know if you find this useful!

How to quickly make a perfect group shot from a couple of images?

It happens alot of times that while taking a group shot, there is atleast one person who is looking somewhere else. So we ask to pose for another shot. However now someone else from the group is not in perfect smile or moving his hands here or there.

Getting a perfect group shot is too simple using PSE.

1. Open the two group shots which are not so perfect and go to File>New> Photomerge Group Shot or Guided Edit > Photomerge> Group Shot

For example :

The above screen appears. Select the base image where most of the people appear perfect and drag it to the empty space on the right where as the source image at left.

If you see the above pictures you would notice that in right image(our base image) , the person on the left has his arm raised. While in the left image, the person at the back has his arms raised.

So we want to have one picture out of these two were none of the guys have their arms raised.

2. Select the pencil tool from right panel and create a selection like the one show below (V-Shaped), where I selected the person on left who appears fine.

As soon as you leave the mouse drag, you would see the results as shown :





But if you see closely, there is a problem in this result which is highlighted as shown below :

Problem highlighted in pink box

So the person highlighted in pink box is having another arm in the result image on right.

It is just one more step. Just select the eraser tool from right panel and rub over the arm area in the source i.e. left image and the extra arm disappears.

And here is my resultant image :)

Final image after applying Photomerge group shot