Lessons

Lesson Info

Workspace Basics: Organizer

Let's talk about this workspace. We've talked about being able to scroll a little bit and seeing our details here or not. Let's also talk over here on the left we have a couple of different buttons. We have this one that says albums and this is a way to create virtual albums to help you organize some of your photos. And we'll be looking at this a little bit in day two. For today and right now, we wanna focus more on this folders button. So here this is just showing me all the different folders that contain images that are part of this catalog. So if I want to see just the images for example that I have in my people folder, I can click there and it will show me just the contents of that folder. Or maybe my places folder or events, et cetera. So I can navigate through looking at images like this. So this is advantageous in the event that you are the type of person that like to download your files into labeled folders on your hard drive. If you make folders for all your different download...

s and you name them a certain way, you might like this feature. It's really helpful in this case when I'm teaching this class, I have different folders for different things that we're gonna work through and talk about. So it was a great way to structure these files. But have no fear. If you're the type of person that just downloads all your pictures into one big keep, that's totally fine too. This is just an extra way to access your pictures. It's not, you don't have to do this in order to make use the of the organizational options in Elements. So that exists here and that's how we're gonna be navigating some of this stuff as we work through all our different examples. We'll be choosing different folders here. So that's a little bit about the folders. If we wanna hide this whole panel, down here this button will let us do that. So if we wanna make more space on our screen here to look at our images, we can open and close this. Okay? You'll also notice there's the five little buttons up here. I've heard this referred to as rooms that Photoshop Elements has five different rooms to work in. I prefer to think of them more like workspace. So this one here is the Elements Live workspace. And what's cool about this is that it's dynamic. So this information is always updated. And if you click on that eLive workspace and scroll down you'll see all kind of new things so Photoshop Elements 15 just came out so this is a good place to check out new features that are available with Elements 15. And they have little tutorials, there's kinds of fun, it's sort of a mix of tips and tutorials and blog posts and just interesting things that Adobe keeps fresh here. So if you are thinking you wanna try some new stuff, this is a good place to find some inspiration and ideas. The media workspace is where we'll be spending most of our time today so we'll come back to that. The people workspace allows us to find faces in our images and tag them. And we'll talk about this later on day two, but you can see that Elements has already found different pictures with faces and is prepared to label these so I can find them easily. So I don't even have to click and tag, like on Facebook when you click and tag people. Elements does that too. And similar to Facebook, how Facebook can start recognizing you and suggest tags for your images, Elements can do the same thing so it makes it really easy so we'll be coming back to this. But that's what happens in the people workspace. The places workspace actually will make use of any GPS data that is in your files. And it will pin them on to a map. So we will come back to this workspace as well tomorrow and take a look at how you can work with existing tags or you can add new tags to your images. And the whole goal of all of these things is to help you find what you're looking for quickly and easily. So sometimes I think people, when you learn about all the different ways that you can organize your files in Elements, sometimes I think some people have a reaction of, oh why would I, why would I do that? Or that seems like a lot of stuff to do to my photos. I just don't, I don't know how that's useful. It's useful because the goal is to always be able to find the photo that you're looking for really quickly. So that's the point of this whole organizing and that basically done by either tagging people, by tagging events or places, or adding keywords. So those four things are what we're gonna be talking about more in depth, but that's, that's the main idea behind all of this. And the whole reason that this organizing component exists. So this is one way is the places. Events is another things So there's another workspace here where we can view our images. I'm gonna go back to all of our, all of our folders here. And we can view our images based on events. So we'll see this again later, but you can break down your entire photo collection and very quickly find what you're looking for based on when it was shot. So even if you download your photos and you never do anything to them, you don't label them, you don't name them, you don't tag them, you don't do anything, you can still find what you're looking for pretty quickly and easily as long as you had your date and time set in your camera or your phone or whatever you captured the image with. So it's instant organization with this events tag. So this is one of my favorite ways to find things if I somehow didn't apply any other attributes. This is pretty handy. So that's a look at some of those things. We're gonna go back to the media space where we spend the majority of our time. And I can collapse these. You can adjust the workspace as you need. So as you saw here, this for some reason, that got all stretched out but we don't, I don't need it to take up that much space. So this is our media space. While you're here, we talked about the details you can turn on and off. You can also adjust the zoom. So I can zoom my images out and see more at a single time or I can zoom in and get a better look at my images. While I'm here I can double click any photo that I wanna take a closer look at. You see that it's recognizing a face and it's asking me, oh you wanna add a name? We'll get to that later. But I can double click any image at any time to see a larger preview of it. If I wanna add a caption, this is one place that I could click to type something in here like sunset portrait. Whatever I wanna add in here. You can rate your images. And this is useful for again, just helping you find things that you're looking for. One of the ways that I use this is when I walk through a workflow that we'll be doing tomorrow. So we'll take a whole batch of images and I'll show you how I just go through them and pair them down to just the ones that are really worth keeping and adding some keywords and organizing them and doing it really quickly because this process ultimately should be simple. Whatever your workflow's gonna be, if it is not easy and fast, you're probably not gonna stick to it and then it doesn't do you any good. So we'll be talking about that and that's one way that we use the stars here, but you can rate your image by just clicking. If I think this, if I wanna label this as a five start image, I can click this fifth star and then that becomes a five star image. That allows me to go back to, let's go back to our main grid here and now if I wanna filter all of my photos from my whole catalog then I can go and say I wanna see every image with five stars. And I have a few that have been tagged with five stars. So this becomes a filter. And I can adjust this if I wanna view five stars, anything greater to or equal to five stars. Anything less than or equal to or I can just say I only want five star images. So let's see if there's anything less. Less than five stars. Oh, for some reason these are labeled two stars. So you can see that you have some options there. To turn this off then, we can just go ahead and click to clear these. So clicking it once will apply that filter and clicking it again will clear it. Down here at the bottom of the workspace we have a few different buttons that we can work with. I know that somewhere in here in my, this whole collection, I know that I have some images that need to be rotated. So I wanna show you, here's some, here's my son on the floor in his room. And of course our camera's now a days usually, if you rotate the camera to take a vertical image, it will usually be noted in the metadata and that image will appear rotated. So here's an example of a vertical image that appears as it should, vertically because the camera has a sensor that makes that happen. But sometime when you're shooting at funny angles, in this case from me standing and shooting down with the camera, it doesn't always register the positioning the way that it should. So it's easy to fix that when that happens and I can even do this whole selection here at once. So I'm gonna click this image here and then shift click this image and it will select all of these images in a string that need to be rotated. And then I can come down here and there's this little rotate button and if I click once they're all going to rotate to the left. There it went. If I need to rotate it to the right, if I had shot it the other way, if I click this little downward carat arrow, I get the option to rotate to the right. So that is a way to quickly go through if you need to just batch rotate. And you can see I have a few more here. So we can just do those quickly as well. It takes a minute just to render, but you can do multiple images at once so that is pretty easy. We also have some quick buttons down here to add locations or event information to your images. And you can also just have an instant slide show or maybe not quite so instant. There we go. Any image, if you click on it and then just go ahead and hit play, it'll just start playing through your collection. That's just kind of a fun, a fun way and you just press escape to get out of there. If at any time you are working through these folders and you're viewing only the images in that folder, the way that you get back to all of your images is up here at the top, by clicking all media and that will return you to your entire catalog. So if for example, I double click on a photo and I'm looking at a close up of it and I wanna get back to everything, I can click up here. Here it says grid because now I'm in a single image view, but this button is gonna do the same thing even if you are in a specific folder. So you can always get back if your, if you suddenly panic and you think I can't find my such and such photo, you just probably have turned on some sort of filter or you're in a folder and so you can just click all media to get back. You'll notice here that I have an assortment of audio files in this catalog. When you create your, when you do your first import and your catalog is created, Photoshop, I think it asks you if you wanna include audio files or not. And I think it's nice to include audio files because if you at any point end up using any of these functions under this create tab, for example, you can create little slide shows and things that can include music, these audio files are here for you to use. So it's nice to have them included. However I like to have mine included, but I don't like to see them in my workspace because it just, it bothers me when I scroll through if I look up and then I'm like what are these annoying audio thumbnails. So if we don't wanna see that, we can actually come up and I believe it's under of course. Media type. So under the view menu, if we come down to media types and we don't wanna see those audio files or video files or any project files that have been created here, if you don't wanna see those, you can just turn that off. So personally I like to get rid of that because I just find it, I find it to be a bit bothersome. So that's an easy thing to fix.