A short introduction to Photoshop Elements

Photoshop Elements is cheaper and simpler than Photoshop but it is still not as simple as picture editors like iPhoto and others that come free with your digital camera or printer. But don't be intimidated by all the windows and options. You can safely ignore most of them until you are ready to learn something new.

When you first open Elements, you get a Splash screen. As you move your mouse over the icons at the top, parts of the program are explained to you. Clicking on them launches the program.

It might be a good idea to read each section the first time you launch the program but if this screen comes up every time you try to launch the program, it will soon get annoying. Click on "Start Up In: Welcome Screen" at the buttom of the screen and change "Welcome Screen" to Editor. (We are going to totally ignore the Organizer for now.

Then click to make the splash screen go away. If you are running the demo version, you'll get another screen showing how many days are left in your trial. Click on the "Try" button to get to the real program.

Once in the Editor, you may want to rearrange the panes to make it less cluttered and give you a bigger area to work on images. In the picture above, "How to" and "Styles and Effects" in the right pane are collapsed because we won't be using them and that entire pane has been made narrower. The pane at the bottom has been made smaller too.

Remember how we said most picture editors have picture viewers built in? To get to Elements' picture viewer, select "File⇒Browse Folders" and Browse to where the images are that you want to work with.

The File Browsers is a very powerful tool as it lets you see your images as thumbnails before you open them. You can jump right to a particular image and you can even rotate images and delete them without having to open them.

At this point, we are ready to use Photoshop Elements to prepare an image for the screen.