Importing and Organizing Images

In this segment, we’ll look at importing your images and managing them using Elements Organizer. First, let’s talk about scanning photographs. Now, I assume that if you’re working with Vintage Photographs, you probably have a ton of them. So one thing I’d like for you to give a little thought to is what’s going to be done with them. For example, are they all going to be stored digitally? If that’s the case, using the JPEG file format, will be the ideal option.

But if you have some that he wanted to get high-quality enlargements printed from, then you would want to go with the TIFF format. The TIFF format retains a lot more image data than JPEG. In fact, it retains just about all of it, whereas JPEG’s a lossy format. Now, for the purposes of this lesson, I’ll be using JPEGs.

Now, another consideration is your scanner settings. Scanning in 300 EPI for photographs is about right. Your scanner may have some options for making exposure and color corrections, which basically means that you can apply some corrections to the image as you scan it, and you may not have to work with it later on. It may come out just perfect from the scanner using these settings.

A little later in this segment, I will show you another option using Elements Organizer that will allow you to make batch corrections to pictures that you may find will save you more time than using the scanner settings. If you have pictures that are too large to scan, you can digitize them using a good camera and tripod setup, similar to that shown.

Now, if you don’t have any studio lighting such that you’d find in a photographer’s studio, the best bet is to digitize them outside on an overcast day. Now, once you have digitized your pictures and imported them into your computer and open them in Photoshop Elements, you may discover a keystone effect. This can be corrected using the prospective command.

Just go to Image, Transform, and Perspective, and use that tool to fix the picture. Transparency, such as slides and negatives, have to be scanned at a higher resolution than photographic prints. Generally, I use a range of between 600 and 1200 DPI, really depending on what the final output is going to be. In most cases, I use 600 DPI and enlarge the image to about 400%, which if I were to print, it would result in a print roughly 4 and 1/2 by 4 and 1/2 if it’s a square slide, or 4 by 6 if it’s a rectangular slide.

As with photographic prints, you also have an assortment of color correction and exposure correction features that you can apply if you like to your transparencies before scanning. Another thing to bear in mind is scanning transparencies is a slow process. It takes much longer to scan those than it does photographic prints.

When you’re ready to start scanning your media, it would be a good idea to plan out the process. Several years ago, we inherited a large collection of family photos and slides. To help keep things sorted out, I made a master folder that all of the images will go in, but within that, are folders for specific pictures. There is a folder for slides, and then sub folders with the years 1967, ‘68, and so on.

We’ve also got a large number of slides with no dates on them, so I just created a folder titled undated and placed them there. Of course if using different titles or designation works better for you, then that’s what you would want to do. Organizer is really useful in managing all those digitized images. Here, I’ll demonstrate importing my images.

I clicked on the Master folder so everything within that folder is being imported into Organizer. Once imported, you can use or organize or to assign ratings, tags, and other means to help manage your images. You’ll notice all the thumbnail images in the main window, and then in the left panel, you can see all the folders and sub folders that we brought in.

Now, at this point, you can probably see how useful Organizer is in managing those images. Here’s the slides in the 1967 folder, 1968, 1970, and so on. Now here’s the feature I want to show you that is really useful if you want to hunt down a specific image. This is a picture of my wife as a little girl, so I want to tag that and I want to add a tag, so let me click that.

And then down here where it says image tags, I’ll tie Sally in swimming pool. And then once I’ve finished that, I’ll add that. So now, let’s click Add. We can see that that tag has been added. So at some point in the future, if I want to find that specific image, I can use the keyword function and it’ll be helpful. Here’s some of the other features in organizer.

You can create a slideshow, collage, print photos, a photo book, there’s a number of things– creative things– that you can do with your images. And this is something I really want to point out that’s helpful in backing up images. You have a number of options of sharing, but this Flickr option is a good way to back those images up. It’s a good additional way.

It’s a good idea to backup your images, say, to an external hard drive or a DVD, or some other means. But it’s also a good idea to have a secondary system of backing up or a redundant system. In this case, somewhere in the cloud, you can use Flickr or another option is to use Google Photos. Earlier in this segment, I mentioned using organizers to apply color and total corrections to your images. Let’s give that a try.

This is the Instant fix options. So let’s click that, and well, first, let’s select our photos, and then click Instant fix. So now we’re in this menu and we have a basic set of tools, there’s crop, red eye, effects, smart fix, light, color, and clarity. I want to try light. These images are just a tad dark.

So I want to go to the third one down from the top and apply that. That brightens them up a little bit. I actually like that, so I’m not going to save it, but I do like the result. But I’m going to get out of this, and I’m not going to save the changes because I want to show you another option that frankly, is probably the better one is the Launch Editor workspace.

This will actually launch Photoshop Elements, and it will bring all these into Photoshop Elements, and then you can use that program to use more advanced editing techniques for better results. I do you want to leave you with one final thought regarding importing and organizing images. Probably a logical workflow if you’re working with a lot of images would be first to digitizing, in other words, scan all your images. Then once you have them digitized, then go through the editing process, which would be color correction, editing, repairing, and things like that.