Adobe Photoshop Album

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition software is no longer available. Adobe is discontinuing the product and ongoing technical support will end as of June 30, 2009. If you recently downloaded Photoshop Album Starter Edition and haven’t yet registered, you must do so by 5 p.m. (Pacific Time) on July 31, 2009 to receive an e-mail with your unlock code.

Adobe is committed to providing customers with a great free photo-editing service and has created Photoshop.com for your use. Upload, edit, organize, share, and back up your photos all in one place. It’s quick to get started with and easy to use.

For current Photoshop Album Starter Edition users, you can transition your entire photo library over to Photoshop.com from within the product. Simply choose your photos and go to the Share menu. Select “Share to Photoshop.com”. You will be asked to create a new account and your photos will be transferred. If you have more than 2GB of images, you will be able to upgrade the storage on your free account to accommodate your entire library.

Adobe offers a complete selection of photo-editing products to suit every need.

If you just want to do more with your photos of favorite people, places, and memories, Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 software combines power and simplicity so you can easily make your photos look extraordinary, tell your stories in personalized photo creations for print and the web, and easily find and view all your photos.

An intuitive digital darkroom and digital assistant in one complete package, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom® 2 software helps passionate photographers—amateur or pro—create more amazing images. Efficiently manage, edit, and showcase photos in a creative environment designed to be powerful enough for professional photographers but accessible enough for you.

With its unrivaled editing power, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the essential software for photographers who care deeply about perfecting their images. Experience complete creative freedom as you make detailed, pixel-level adjustments to your images and perform advanced compositing.

Adobe Photoshop Album: How to Organize Your Digital Photos

Step 1: Get a Good Photo Management Program

The first step in organizing your precious photos is to get a good photo management program. Some people maintain that you don’t need a dedicated program to organize your photos – they prefer to use native Windows XP features to do the organizing.

Personally, I think a dedicated, commercial grade program is better since they is usually more user friendly and there are a host of extra features (e.g. the ability to catalog and backup your photos).

Step 2: Bring your Photos into Photoshop Album

Now the next thing you need to do in the organization process is to import those pictures into Photoshop Album. If your pictures reside in your camera, then make sure you hook up the USB cable between the camera and computer. Then click on the Get Photos button with Photoshop Album. If your pictures are already in your computer’s hard drive, then click on From Files and Folders in the menu.

I guess it’s appropriate to introduce my folder structure for digital photos. I use a very simple folder hierarchy. In my computer’s C: drive, I have a folder called ‘Photos’. Under ‘Photos’, I have 3 subfolders.

The ‘Raw photos’ directory stores all original versions of my pictures. This means they have been untouched by any image editing program. Assuming I had 50 photos in my collection, I’d name the photos here in running order using filenames like PIC0001.jpg, PIC0002.jpg, PIC0003.jpg … PIC0050.jpg.

The ‘Edited photos’ directory will contain only the edited versions of my images after perform edits like cropping, sharpening or red-eye removal. Following the above example, if I only edited PIC0001.jpg and PIC0003.jpg, then only these two files would appear in this folder.

The ‘Unsorted photos’ directory is sort of a temporary area I use to store any new pictures imported from the camera. After I import the pictures, they may have funny names like IMG001.jpg, IMG002.jpg, etc. What I usually do is to rename them according to my convention in the ‘Raw photos’ folder. In the above example, I would name the photos in the ‘Unsorted photos’ directory as PIC0051.jpg, PIC0052.jpg, PIC0053.jpg, etc.

Step 3: Tag your Photos

With your pictures imported into Photoshop Album, you can begin the tagging process. What’s that you ask? What’s tagging? Well, tagging is a cool concept found in photo management software. What you do is to attach descriptive text called tags (e.g. ‘Uncle Joe’, ‘Robert’s Birthday’, ‘School Play’), to each photo in your collection. When you do this, you no longer need to worry about a picture’s filename, folder or date. All the need is the tag that you entered.

For example, if I had a tag called ‘Uncle Joe’ attached to 30 pictures in my hard drive (regardless of their filename, which folders they were in or when they were taken), all I need to do is to search for the tag ‘Uncle Joe; in Photoshop Album. The program will automatically locate and retrieve those 30 pictures for my viewing pleasure.

OK, back to Photoshop Album. If you have existing tags, you can attach them to your photos by dragging and dropping them on individual photos. You can tell that a photo has been tagged if there is a small icon shown in the photo’s thumbnail.

If you don’t have an existing tag, you can create a new one choosing the Tag > New Tag option from the menu. You’re allowed to specify the category of the tag (e.g. People, Places, Events) and can enter the actual tag keyword, along with a note for describing the tag.

Step 4: Move Your Photos to Appropriate Folders

Once you’ve tagged all your photos in Photoshop Album, it doesn’t matter where they reside in the computer’s hard drive. If you’ve just imported a new batch of photos, you can proceed to now move your digital photos to whichever folders you want. For me, I’d first rename any new photos in my ‘Unsorted Photos’ folder, then proceed to move them into the ‘Raw Photos’ folder.

Step 5: Edit Your Photos If Necessary

You can perform basic image edits like rotation within Photoshop Album itself. Basic image editing functions like rotation, cropping and red-eye removal are readily available at the click of a button.

Step 6: Backup All Your Photos Regularly

Within Photoshop Album, there is a function to regularly backup your entire photo catalog. All database information (in particular, tag information) will be backed up as well. You will want to get a CD burner, DVD burner or even an external hard drive to cater for this purpose.

Adobe Photoshop Album: Sharing Your Photographs

The final option you have is to share your photographs. Choose Share from the Quick Guide. You can then choose from the following options:

If you select the Email option, a new window called Attach Selected Items To Email opens. You can choose which files you want to send, to whom you want to send the files, the final size and quality of the images (modifying these will change the final file size of your image), and whether or not to send the images as a PDF slide show or as individual JPEG images.

If you choose Local Printer, you will be presented with ways to print your images. You can choose from Individual Sheets, Contact Sheets, or Picture Packages. These collections are exactly the same layout as those used by professionals. The quality of the final print will depend on the type of paper you use and the quality of the printer.

You can have your images printed as real photographs online from three different online print companies. Each company has specialization tools you can use.

Finally, you can also share your photographs online. You can invite friends and family to come, view, and download the images.

Adobe Photoshop Album: Adding a Creative Flair

Now that you have this vast collection of images, shouldn’t you do something with them?

The Starter Edition of Adobe PhotoShop Album gives you only one creative option. From the Quick Guide select the Create option, from which you can create a slide show from a collection of photographs or a category of images.

The final slide show is exported as an Adobe Acrobat file. The file is optimized for Acrobat 6.0 You can view the file in Acrobat 5.0, but I recommend upgrading to version 6.0.

Adobe Photoshop Album: Fixing Images

I will be the first to admit that I belong to the school of “Take One Hundred Shots and Hope That One Will Be Good.” Unfortunately, not all of us have a good eye for an image. And when you do take a good image, you often miss the mark or you get that great red-eye effect with the flash. Adobe PhotoShop Album comes to your help again.

Open the Quick Guide and choose the Fix option. You are presented with three ways in which you can fix your images:

When you make changes to your images, Adobe PhotoShop Album creates a copy of the original and applies the new changes to the new copy. Your original photo is never tampered with or accidentally changed.

Select the photo you want to fix and choose the Single Click Fix option. A new window called Fix Photo opens. The default view shows you what your photo will look like. You can automatically apply the following effects:

If you don’t like the tweaking, select the Undo button to return to the previous setting.

The Fix Photo window also allows you to crop your photos. When you crop an image, you select the section of the image you want to keep; the rest is deleted (again, this is a copy, not the original photo).

Finally, you can also remove red eye. All you have to do is draw a rectangle around the area of the red eye and select the Apply Red Eye Removal button. As easy as that, the red eye is gone.

If you like what you see, click OK to save your results to the copy of the original image.

Organizing Images with Adobe Photoshop Album: Using Tag Organization

A tag is a category you can create that can then be associated with a specific image. Any one image can have several tags.

Creating and using tags is easy. From the Quick Guide screen that comes up when you open Adobe PhotoShop Album, choose Organize. If this is your first experience, you won’t have any tags yet. Let’s create one.

Select the Create New Tag button from the right column. The Tag Editor window pops up with a collection of categories. Choose Family from the drop-down menu and enter the value Football 2004. Select OK. You now have a blank tag you can use.

Drag the tag onto a photo. The first photo now becomes the icon for the tag. You can drag the tag onto any other photo, which creates an organized Adobe PhotoShop Album of images. Click the tag if you want to see all the images in any given Adobe PhotoShop Album. This will show you all of the images in that category. Easy and slick to use.

Organizing Images with Adobe Photoshop Album: Using Date Organization

You now have a lot of images in Adobe PhotoShop Album. What do you do with them? How can you find anything? Where did those DisneyWorld photos from 2004 go? What you need to do is organize your images.

Adobe PhotoShop Album makes organization easy. There are two distinct ways to do this: by using dates or tags.

The default organization tactic is by date. Look at the scrub bar across the top of Adobe PhotoShop Album (you can click and drag it back and forth). Beneath the bar is a date. Your images are automatically collected into groups per month for any given date. So, if you are looking for the holiday photos taken last summer, drag the scrub bar to July 2004,when you took your vacation You will find your photos under that date.

This is handy, but any given month will have more than just the photos you are looking for. For instance, October might contain photos of Halloween, the fall trip you took, the kids competing in football, a birthday, and other events. What is needed is more detailed organization, which is where tags come into play.

Importing Photos into Adobe PhotoShop Album

The first step in the process is to import photos and other digital images into Adobe PhotoShop Album. Select the Get Photos option in the Adobe PhotoShop Album Quick Guide.

The screen that comes up has four options:

There are four ways to import images into PhotoShop Album.

If you have not used Adobe PhotoShop Album before, I suggest that you select Search Hard Drive to find all files that can be imported into Adobe PhotoShop Album. When you select this option, a new window pops up that allows you to search your computer’s hard drives. This window is called Get Photos By Searching for Folders. The Get Photos By Searching for Folders window locates all folders on your computer that contain images.

The Get Photos By Searching for Folders window is much smarter than many competing products on the market. Most “search for appropriate files” importers look for every type of file on your computer. However, your computer is already filled with lots of bitmaps and images that you do not want in your Adobe PhotoShop Albums. To get around this, the Adobe PhotoShop Album importer ignores files smaller than a specified size (the default is 100Kb) and does not search Systems files on your computer. You can direct which hard drive you store your images on.

After you specify the search, you can run it. Very quickly, a catalog of all the folders that contain images will be created. You can select an image to preview it; you can choose to important all images; you can even choose to only import specific images. Adobe PhotoShop Album then imports all the images. At this point, you can move onto the next step: organizing your images.

If you have a digital camera, you can import the images from the camera into Adobe PhotoShop Album. Selecting the Import button opens the Get Photos from Camera or Card Reader, which allows you to import files from camera.

Similarly, an image from a scanner can be imported directly into Adobe PhotoShop Album. Simply choose the Scanner option from Get Photos, which will step you through the process of importing images from your scanner.

An entire folder of images can be imported with the File Folders option from Get Photos. This import process allows you to search for folders of images on your hard drive. You can select groups of images and import them directly into Adobe PhotoShop Album.

Running Adobe PhotoShop Album for the First Time

The first time you open Adobe PhotoShop Album, you see a Quick Guide screen with five different choices that are designed to help you get things done more quickly. The Quick Guide gives you give a quick way to import, organize, and manage your photos.

The choices are the following:

The organization of these steps helps you create better pictures.

You do not need to have the Quick Guide pop up each time you open Adobe PhotoShop Album. Deselect the Show This Window at Startup check box in the bottom-left corner to prevent this screen from displaying.

Organize Your Memories with Adobe’s Photoshop Album

I installed PhotoShop Album by mistake. I was reading an Adobe Acrobat file from the Internet, and while the file opened, Acrobat asked me if I wanted to see whether there were any updates to the software. Sure, why not? A few seconds later, Adobe Acrobat told me that there were indeed some new updates—and a new piece of software called PhotoShop Album. Would I like it, too? Heck, why not, I thought. A few minutes later, I was up and running.

Because Adobe is working hard to get PhotoShop Album out to the masses, you may already have it installed on your computer. If so, you’ll find it under the Adobe subfolder in the All Programs section off of the Start button.

NOTE: If you don’t have PhotoShop Album installed, you need to download the software from http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/main.html, which also offers additional tips, tricks, and ideas.

The free version of PhotoShop Album is the Starter Edition, which is the edition covered in this article. For another $40 or so, you can upgrade to the full version. I recommend that you start with the free version to see if you like what you can do with PhotoShop Album. If so, upgrading is a snap, and you will unlock a boatload of additional features.

Adobe Photoshop Album

Adobe Photoshop Album Links

Sites

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .