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 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.