11:14 am

Deep Breaths, Today has not started well. Have to fly out of Denver International Airport (motto: We are so far out of town we also serve parts of Ohio) and missed my flight. Left in time but freeway traffic was slow and the parking was packed. Went to one of those outside airport parking lots where you hop a shuttle. The driver kept stopping for everyone even though there were two shuttles behind him and we were packed. My guess was he was mad at the other shuttle drivers and didn’t want them to take anyone to the airport. Finally we got to the terminal and I hopped off. Only had one carry on so ran straight for security.

Loooooooooooog lines but what do you do. Stood there while people texted and did not notice the line moving and young parents (Rant note, for you young parents out there you may want to skip to the next paragraph, Thanks) Young parents decided that this would be a great Mommy Moment to teach their 3 and 4 year old how to carry heavy bags, stand in line, and have a long discussion with them on why they should pick up the bags and keep moving. This happen at least 17 times making me wish I could throw my voice, (Sinister Stocker Voice “Wow look at all the young kids” the next sound is parents grabbing their kids and running ahead)Tick Tock.

Finally got to the line where you strip down and stood where the full body scans are because I have an artificial knee and always set off the metal detectors. I hate standing in that little box of shame in the other lines for a half hour waiting for someone to wand me to death so I don’t mind the five seconds of shame. Actually it is worst for that guy upstairs since he has to look at the great shape we Americans are in. Get up there, stand with arms over head and it swings around. Get out and they ask to step aside while someone pats me down. Pats me down!! The guy upstairs just saw a mole on backside and someone wearing latex gloves is going to do a better job!

This ex Wal-Mart Greeter comes up and wants to be my best friend (Tick Tock)While trying to put on the latex gloves tells me all about his grand kids (Still trying to get on the gloves) how his garden is doing (Tick Tock, In my Head “Would you like me to spit on your hands to see if that helps? “. He gets them on and we have the end of a wonderful date.

Run and get my bags and make a mad dash for the shuttle train. Smart enough to get the middle cars since most people grab the ones at the ends and get to have my legs banged up by a stroller the size of VW bug.

Run down the concourse and get to see the door closing and my plane backing away.

So here I sit waiting on standby and hopefully a seat on another fight. Expect updates and no mercy for my fellow travelers as to what they wear, how they look, and choice of mates.

11:19 am

Ok this weird. I can not post anything to Facebook or my blog using the WiFi at the Airport. Perhaps they don’t want real time rants as to service or smells of fellow passengers?

11:42 am

Day one: Ok just a hour or more: Doing well, found some gum at the bottom of my laptop case. Seven sticks so I should be good for a week. Suspect there are “Others” as I keep hearing small children crying and grown men talking to themselves though something they call a Blue Tooth. Hopefully I won’t be here so long as to have my teeth change colors. Will try to find something to drink at local watering spot called a StarBuck. Still have my humanity.

12:01 pm

Day one: Made contact with some of the “Others” The elders seem friendly enough want to engage me in conversation even if I don’t make eye contact and pile my bags around me like a small fort. Had to change camps because of a tribe I will call “The Dicks” (TD). These are mostly males, well dressed but keep having loud conversations with themselves. Some appear quite upset and even threatening someone named “Bob” with “tearing him a new one!” I am afraid they may turn volatile so moved to another part of the Island.

Was able to barter for some food from a tribe call Vendors. They did not want my gum but did take a small piece of plastic I found in my wallet.

If anyone finds this journal please pass it along to my family and they them I love them.

12:16

Day one: If needed I think I have found some coverings if the weather turn cold. They look to be orange shirts with a horse’s head on them and the word “Broncos” underneath. Might be some-type of religious garment since I see a lot of them on many of the “Others” here. Some speak of this as being an football team but by the shape of those I see I don’t think they could be very active. The “Vendor” is friendly enough and said he would also take my plastic card as payment.

12:45

Day one: I have named my laptop Dell. Placed a hand print on it but had to clean it off so I could see the screen.

I have observed many strange behaviors from the “Others”. One that is very strange is by the young women with small children. They seem to be in some kind of religious trance when their little ones start to act up. The woman will just stare off and repeat the mantra of “Stop, Don’t, Stop, I am warning you, Don’t, Stop, I won’t tell you again, Don’t Stop.” over and over again.

I think that will write a book about this time here and call it Fliers in the Mist.

1:27pm

Day one: Have noticed a disturbing trend. Many of the “Others” seem to be disappearing through doors not to seen again. I went up to speak to one of the protectors of these doors and see if I can go through but no go yet.

Note to self, Jedi mind tricks and telling them that I am a Photoshop Instuctor has no effect.

3:00 pm

Well I finally got out DIA but not on plane but in my car. Got bumped from one Phoenix flight but was told to run over the Albuquerque flight to get to Phoenix that was leaving now. Ran to the desk and was told (I am not making this up) that I could get a seat on the Albuquerque flight and that there were 3 flights out of Albuquerque to Phoenix.
“So I fly to Albuquerque and then get on a flight to Phoenix?”
“Well you would be on stand by in Albuquerque but there seems to be more empty seats there than out of Denver.”
“But I would be first in line for stand by?”
“Well no but there seems to be more empty seats out of Albuquerque for Phoenix.”
“So if I understand you I fly to Albuquerque and maybe get a flight out but if I don’t then I am stuck in Albuquerque.”
“There is that chance. Plus if you don’t get a flight out today you will not get on stand by tomorrow and would have to buy a ticket.”
So it took just a New York Minute to decide to stay in Denver where I live rather than spend the weekend in the Albuquerque International Airport. At this point I just don’t feel that lucky. Thanks Southwest Airlines for a wonderful day.

For both Bridge and Organizer there is a very handy feature call Stacks. This allows you to select a number of images and in effect stack them up. This helps in collecting images that where the same topic or shot under the same light condition. Once you have a stack you can reopen the stack to select and work on one image or process the whole stack in the ACR or in the edit mode.

To stack you just select the images and go to the top menu for Stack or use the key board short cut of Ctrl or Command G.

Stacks can be moved to other folders or just rearranged in the view panel.

Couple more Organizer tip

Within PSE Organizer there are a couple of simple ways to keep your images in line. A simple way is to Stack the images. Just select the images you want to stack together by Ctrl (Command for Mac) click or select the first image in a row and hold down the shift key and click on the last one. Go up to the top menu and under Edit go down to the Stack command. There will be two choices, one is to let Organizer suggest stacks or to stack selected images. These images will collect up under the first image with a small number in the upper left hand corner. This number is the number of images in the stack. To open the stack, double click on the number or that little icon on the right side with the arrow. The stack will expand and you can click on one image or a few for editing. What stacking does is remove all the same type of images you look at so you can move through the large collection of images.

For Mac users with PSE 8 you have the Adobe CS 4 Bridge for an Organizer with the same stacking but in a separate menu choice in the upper menu.

Another organizer tip is Albums. Like Tagging you can create albums of a collection of images which can come in handy for slide shows or other creations. Once an Album is created then it is just simple click and drag to set up Albums.

For both Photoshop Elements and Lightroom a new way of looking at collecting images and saving was introduced called Catalogs. For a long time looking at images was just going to a folder and seeing what was inside. However as we started to collect more and more images it was decided by the powers that there had be a better way of viewing than thousands of images in one folder or images spread out in hundreds of folders. Nothing is more frustrating that looking for one image and not be able to find it.

Catalogs are different in that instead of just seeing inside one folder they can see across multiple folders or just be a collection of all images. This can be another way of organizing our image files this can be very helpful. As mention earlier if you are tagging your images then a single catalog of images can work. But you can create different Catalogs of subjects but there can be drawbacks. As I said Catalogs are collections and if an image was not in it then you are not going to find the image. The good news is these are smaller groups of images so finding something is easier and if you are the type who makes backups of groups on CDs or DVDs a Catalog makes this very easy.  Plus with Catalog you can create separate tags for each one.

With Photoshop Elements we are given a very powerful tools for handling images and making it handy for keeping our lives in order.  Some a automatic and some do require just a little effort from us. Let’s talk about the automatic ones first.

Tagging our images

Elements tend to handle images differently than just a normal file viewing program. While the Organizer does allow us to see all the images on our drives if we don’t something to keep them in order then it just becomes a huge shoebox of pictures that we have to view every time we want to do something. Here is an easy way to start to clean up the mess. It is called Tagging.  Tagging is nothing more than attaching words like vacation spots, people and pet’s name, locations, and the like to images so when you want to find just those images you just click on the tags and those images pop up.  It is not hard to create tags or to tag images.

From Organizer you go the Keyword Tag Pallet. Normally it is on the right hand side with some pre set colorful tags there. You can start to use these preset right away since they are generic titles like People, Place, Events and even the most useful one Other. A good place to start is with People since most of the images will be family and friends. Here you can add names of your family. Pick the category you want to add to like family, click on the Plus Sign at the top of the pallets and just add a name then click OK. Click and drag the tag to any image with that person in it and it is done. Now when you click in the box next to the tag all images that you have tagged will come up. Selection can be made even easier by getting groups of this person selected by Ctrl or Command Clicking or selecting the first image in a group then holding down the shift key click on the last image in a group. All the images in between will be selected.  Then with you click and drag the tag all the images will be tagged. This same trick works for vacation images or shots taken at a birthday party. The more tags you have the better your search will be. You can even put more than one tag on an image so that if there is a group of people you can tag each one so later you can find the images with that person in it.

This will work for landscapes or location photos too. Set up a category for your landscapes then place tags under it for Mountains, Plains, Beach, Snow, Desert, Flowers or what ever and tag the images. That way if you are looking for your shots of Snowy Mountain tops you can click on Mountains and Snow and just those images will come up.

One Bonus Tip, since Photoshop Organizer works as a Catalog Viewer (more on that later) when you create tags they only live inside of Photoshop Organizer. One good thing to do every once and while to embed them into the megadata for each image.  This command is found in File/Write Tags into Megadata. Then your tags are now in the keywords of the megadata which is always with any image file. Then if something should happen to your Photoshop Elements or you update then the keywords are always there.

In our continuing drama of Camera to Computer to Publish we first talked about getting the images out of the camera with a card reader. Now the fun part of what to do as they come into the computer. There are two powerful programs built into Photoshop and Photoshop Elements that not only help upload the images but can help organize them. The first one we will talk about is under Photoshop Elements called the Organizer. One quick note if you have Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac you really have the Bridge from CS 4 which we will talk about in the next post. The Photoshop Elements Organizer works different from Bridge in that rather than a file viewer it creates Catalogs of images which is much like a copy machine which opens the images and creates a small sub set of thumbnail. These catalogs allow you create separate catalogs of images that can be backed up to other folders, hard drives and even CDs or jump drives.

What happens when you first load Photoshop Elements is that it will look for all the images on your hard drive to set up a master catalog of images. These will come up as thumbnail images in Organizer that can be resized for ease of viewing. There is a little slider at the top of the page which you can click and slide or click on the icons at each end. The one on the left makes the thumbnails the smallest size and the one on the right makes each one full size. You can even click and drag the order of the images around for grouping.

However before we get too much into the operation of Organizer let talk about what happens when you use it to import images from the camera card.

A menu box will come up asking what you would like to do with the images on the card. This same message can be gotten right from Elements under File/Get Photos or Videos/ then select Camera, Scanners, Files or folders, or just searching if it doesn’t pop up. If you are using a card reader just find this as an external drive.

This box is more than just a simple click on the Get Photo button. First you can set up a main folder where you always import your photos to.  If you already have a folder set up like a My Photos then you can use this or if you want to set up an folder on an external drive you can do this too. Elements will remember where you set this folder so next time you can quickly move to the next section which is Sub Folders. A sub folder is just that, a new folder under the main folder for holding images. This is a very useful feature since it acts like file cabinet with labels rather than a shoebox with all the images piled in it. Later we will show how to view all the images or just those in the sub folders.

So with a sub folder made you can chose to rename the files as they are imported. I do recommend this since the camera uses such useful names like 281908.jpg for an image of mountain lake, (Just kidding, mountain lakes are always numbered in the 5000s) or some other sequential number from when you first purchased the camera. By renaming you make it easier for you find the images later if you are using a simple system. One system is to get your subfolder a location and date name. Let’s say you shot a bunch of images in Yellowstone Park in June of 2009 while on vacation. A good name for the Sub Folder could be Yellowstone09. This same subfolder name can be used for the files with a numbering system like Yellowston09001.jpg. You should be able to recall that wonderful mountain fall you took there and the approximate year. From there it is a quick visual search of the folder for the image.  Before you click on the Get Photos button please make sure that the box at the bottom which says Do Not Delete images from card is highlighted. I feel you do not want to delete the images with a computer but reformat the card in the camera to delete images. This is because a computer does it just like any computer drive or external drives devises like a jump drive. It is much better to let the camera do this because with some cameras it need a special folder or bit files for writing image. You don’t want to risk a stray 0 or 1 that would keep images off the card or not allow to transfer them off the card when you get back home.

So that is the simple way for a few images. But what if you have a number of cards or 1000s of images and want a more effective way of finding them? That will be a job for Tags, Catalogs and Albums which is going to be in the next post.

One of many questions I get not only in class but from strangers in the street. (And you thought that you ran into strange people on the street) is “Before I can even get started on editing my photos how do I get the images from the camera and into computer?”

For years we have been trained by camera makers with film to load the camera with a new roll and when you can’t advance the film any more to rewind the film and take it to the local drug store and wait for the prints. With digital we can not only shoot but view the images on the back of the camera. For those that want a print then we take out the camera card, go to camera desk at the local department store and upload them for prints. So at this point we are still in the shoot and print mode.

However for all the normal people out there (you geeks and photographers do not fall into this group) it is just a bit of mystery for getting the images into the computer for not only editing but sharing in emails. So for the normal people here is a new term and gizmo for just this function.  The gizmo (a real computer term) is called a Card Reader. These are simple USB devises that just hook up to the computer which you put the cards into and the computer will see it and upload the images to the computer. (See Below)

A couple of Card Readers

These can simple one card type of readers to 7 or 11 in one readers.  Now I know every camera comes with a USB cord for uploading right from the camera I really don’t like these for a couple of reason. First uploading from the camera can be slow and there has been a couple of reports that an energy spike from the computer has caused problems in the camera. To me I would much rather lose a $10 card reader and maybe a camera card than a $300 (or more) camera.

Here is even more good news for those who have purchased a printer in the last few years. Many of these new printers have card readers built in. Once you have put the card into either of these readers most computers will automatically see the card and give you the choice of uploading and saving the images to the computer.

So to keep the posts short for now just upload the images to a folder where you can locate them later like the iPhoto or Images folder. For a bonus tip I even suggest a separate folder for each time to help in finding the images. If they are of special event like a birthday or trip then make the folder name that has event and a date like Buffy’s Birthday 6/10 or Yellowstone 09. Then when you look in the main folder you can more quickly find the images you want.

Next posts will include how to better organize the images and even set up quick ways to find the ones you want with just a few key words.

As a Photoshop and Digital Photography teacher I have written many workbooks for my classes from Basic DSLR operation to full Photoshop classes. Lately I have been getting requests from other teachers for these workbooks for their classes.

Well at first I was just going to give them away till my loving wife said “Are you crazy!!!!” So I will be setting up links on this and other websites for the workbooks in various formats so teachers (and people who are interested in knowing more) can purchase and download. The prices will be low so even a teacher can afford them.

With a new year I promise (pie crust promise???) to try and post more lessons in both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. With a new version of Photoshop promised for this year, CS 5, and Photoshop Elements just came out with Elements 8 for both Mac and Windows.

The main difference between Elements Mac and Windows is the file browser. Window is still the Organizer while Mac has the Bridge from CS 4. I wish it was the same for Window for those of us who work in Raw files. With the Mac and Bridge you can access the full version of the ACR or Raw Converter by right clicking on the image for the drop down menu.

A few months back (Gee were we ever that young?) I posted on how to make copies of images in different formats in both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements (PSE). This was one of my favorite tools called the Image Processor.

This tool worked pretty much the same for both but in the newly released PSE 8 it changed. It is found under File>Export New Image. You can still pick the type of file copy you would like, Tiff, PSD, Jpeg, but now when you pick Jpeg you get a sub set of fixed sizes like a web size of 800 x 600 but if you have a custom size in mind you need to click on the Custom for it. Not a big deal but a little confusing for those of us set in our ways.