What You’ll Learn in This Hour:
<objective>Learn how to transfer images from your camera or phone to Photoshop Elements
</objective> <objective>Explore different methods of connecting your computer to your phone or camera
</objective> <objective>Scan photos using a flatbed scanner
</objective> <objective>Capture still images from a video clip
</objective> <objective>Change an image’s size and increase its canvas size
</objective> </feature>Every single one of the wonderful things Photoshop Elements can do—or can enable you to do—starts with an image, usually a photo. Whether you’ve been snapping like mad with your digital camera or you’re buried in photo prints from the last 20 years, you need to get your photos into Photoshop Elements before you can begin to work on them.
These days, your photos are almost as likely to be residing on your cell phone as they are to be stored on a digital camera. Have you noticed that people have pretty much stopped using the term camera phone? That’s because the ability to take photos is so widespread among today’s cell phones. Anyway, odds are, you have at least one of these handy devices, so you’ll need to learn how to move photos from it to your computer and into Photoshop Elements. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that there’s more than one way to accomplish that goal.
The simplest way to move files back and forth between a computer and another device is to use a USB cable (see Figure 4.1). Almost all digital cameras come with one of these—or a USB-connected dock where the camera rests—and you can also get them for many cell phones. Plug in one end, plug in the other end, and you’re good to go.
Another option is to remove the storage medium from your camera—cell phones don’t usually let you do this—and insert it in a reader attached to your computer. This has the advantage of increasing the life of your camera batteries because the camera doesn’t need to be powered up while the photos are being transferred.
USB cables for cameras and phones are different from the ones you use to connect printers, external hard drives, and similar devices to your computer. They have smaller connectors on the device end because the devices themselves are small. Be sure you have the right cable for your phone or camera. You don’t have to match your device’s brand; if the cable’s connectors fit on both ends, you’re all set.
When you connect a camera to your computer and then turn it on, the Adobe Photo Downloader should appear (see Figure 4.2). If it doesn’t, go to the Organizer and choose File, Get Photos and Videos, From Camera or Card Reader. You can stick with most of the default settings. Let’s give it a try.
That’s the “get-’er-done” method of importing photos; if you want more control over the process, click Advanced Dialog instead in step 5. The Standard dialog and the Advanced dialog have two big differences (see Figure 4.3). First, in the Advanced dialog, you can choose which photos you want to import instead of automatically importing everything on the camera’s storage card. Second, you can modify the photos as you import them by fixing red eyes, adding image data such as a copyright, and automatically grouping the photos into stacks of related images. Any changes you make to these settings remain until you change them again, even if you restart Photoshop Elements or your computer.
The procedure of importing photos from a card reader is almost identical to what you’ve just seen with a USB cable. A card reader stands in for the camera and USB cable so that you don’t have to hook and unhook the cable each time you have photos to import, and so that your camera batteries last longer. A USB card reader gets power directly from your computer, so you don’t even have to plug it into an electrical outlet.
Card readers are inexpensive ($10–$30 as I write this), and most of them can read multiple storage formats. Be sure you know what kind of storage your camera uses before you go shopping for a card reader. For example, Sony cameras use Memory Sticks, but Olympus and many other camera brands use a CompactFlash (CF) or Secure Digital (SD) formats (see Figure 4.4).
By the Way
Your mileage might vary, of course, but I have found USB card readers to be problematical. More than once, I’ve seen them cause massive slowdowns in an entire computer system. You might pay a bit more, but try to stick to a major brand, such as IOGEAR, Belkin, or Kensington, for the best chance that your card reader will be trouble free.
To use a card reader, eject the memory card from your camera and insert it into the appropriate slot on the card reader. Photoshop Elements should detect the card and start the Adobe Photo Downloader. If it doesn’t, go to the Organizer and choose File, Get Photos and Videos, From Camera or Card Reader. From there, you can follow the same steps you did earlier when you connected your camera directly to your computer.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words; other times, you really need a video. The great thing is, you can have both. Using Photoshop Elements, you can grab the perfect moment from a video and turn it into a photo that you can print or use in any Photoshop Elements project.
Your starting point must be a video in one of these formats: ASF, AVI, MPEG, MPG, M1V, or WMV. To import a frame from it, follow these steps:
Switch to the Editor and choose File, Import, Frame from Video.
In the Frame from Video dialog box (see Figure 4.5), click Browse to locate the video; then select the file and click Open.
Click Play to start the video.
When you see the image you want to capture, click the Grab Frame button or press the spacebar. You won’t see the new file, but Photoshop Elements will open it in a new window behind the video player window.
If you want to capture more frames from the same video file, use the Rewind and Fast Forward buttons to move through the video and grab each frame as it appears on the screen.
Click each image window in turn and choose File, Save to save the file to a folder on your computer.
In the Save As dialog, give each file a name, choose a format (Photoshop is your best bet), and click Save. (You’ll learn more about saving files in Hour 3, “Starting and Saving Your Work.”)
Did you Know?
When you’re saving new images, whether they’re frame grabs or artwork you’ve created from scratch, be sure to click Include in the Organizer in the Save As dialog. That way, you won’t have to hunt through your hard drive for the image when you’re ready to work with it again. If you don’t use this option, the files you’ve just saved will not show up in the Organizer’s Photo Browser.
Got hard copy? No problem! Photo scanners are inexpensive these days, and their quality is generally very good. Mine’s an Epson Perfection model, but Microtek and Hewlett-Packard, among others, also make excellent flatbed scanners. Some of these even have built-in film loaders so you can scan negatives easily. At any rate, a scanner is a worthwhile accessory for your computer because even when you’re not scanning photos, you can use it for useful tasks such as making quick “photocopies” of documents.
Back when I started writing about Photoshop, scanners were the only way to get pictures into your computer. You photographed stuff using a film camera, got the pictures or slides printed, and then scanned them. Now, I hardly ever have to scan stuff. But I have years and years’ worth of old photo prints sitting in my closet—I think it’s time to get scanning again!
You need to decide a few things when you’re scanning an image, starting with whether you want the image to be black and white (as in, only those two colors—best for a text document), grayscale (as in black and white photos), or color. Then you need to consider resolution.
We talked about image resolution in the last hour (if you need a review, take another look at “Adjusting Resolution” in Hour 3. The condensed version is this: Higher-resolution files have more pixels in them, so they look better (smoother) when you zoom in on them or print them at bigger sizes. But those files are bigger, too. So it’s important to choose the right resolution for whatever you’re scanning and what you intend to do with it.
One quick note on cropping before we get down to actually scanning something. By cropping, I mean the step in which you choose what area of the scanner bed you want to include in the image.
I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, I have a friend who never crops her scans. She just plops each snapshot into the middle of her scanner bed and clicks Scan. So all the photos she emails me have a huge white border around them, which is distracting and also makes the files much bigger than they should be (see Figure 4.6). On the other hand, I’ve had to redo a scan more than once because I cropped too closely in the scanning process and clipped off the edge of the image. So I recommend that you do a preview scan, draw a cropping marquee around the image, and then pull its edges out a bit to make sure you’re not cutting anything off. It’s easy enough to recrop the image after you get it into Photoshop Elements, so there’s no reason not to play it safe.
Scanning
Okay, let’s give it a try. Find a photo you want to scan, blow gently across its surface to remove dust (if necessary), and follow these steps:
Place your artwork in the scanner. Be sure it’s not jammed up against the edge of the scanning bed so that an edge gets cut off.
In the Organizer, choose File, Get Photos and Videos, From Scanner.
In the Get Photos from Scanner dialog (see Figure 4.7), choose your scanner from the Scanner pop-up menu. If you don’t see any scanners listed, you need to reinstall your scanner software from the original disc.
Click Browse if you want to change the location where the scanned image files will be saved.
Choose a file format. I recommend JPEG, with the Quality slider set to 12. (We’ll talk more about JPEG quality levels in Hour 3.)
Click OK. Photoshop Elements starts your scanner software.
The interface varies, depending on what scanner you have, but the basics are the same. Most scanning software these days uses two modes: one pretty basic and one for experts. In the basic mode, you choose your document type (text, photo, and so on). In expert mode, you get to customize the settings for color and resolution.
When you have your settings, click Preview.
Drag in the window to select the area you want to scan. Your scanner software might automatically select the picture on the scanner bed; in this case, I usually just drag the marquee out from each corner to make it a bit bigger.
Click Scan.
Your scanner does its thing. Then Photoshop Elements saves the image as a new file and adds it to the Organizer. Just as it does when you bring in photos from a camera or from files on your hard drive, the Organizer shows only the new images in the Photo Viewer (see Figure 4.8).
By the Way
When you first see your scan, you might be a bit disappointed. For one thing, it has a white border around it that you might want to get rid of, and it might be a bit crooked. The colors might need some adjustment, it might be somewhat blurry, and the image might be too light or too dark. Never fear! We get into how to fix all these flaws in Part II, “Simple Corrections.”
The settings in the Editor’s Image Size dialog box determine the size at which an image displays on a web page or in prints. Changing these settings can involve changing the number of pixels an image contains (resampling) or leaving the pixels the same and changing the resolution (the number of pixels crammed into an inch within the image). If you need to review how image size and resolution are related, turn back to “Adjusting Resolution” in Hour 3.
Canvas size is a completely different thing. To understand how it works, let’s try an analogy. Suppose you draw a doodle on a sticky note. It completely fills up the note, so that there’s no space left to draw anything else. Now imagine that you can transfer that doodle to a letter-size sheet of paper, with the doodle remaining the same size. You have a lot of room to add to your doodle now, right? The paper size is analogous to canvas size in Photoshop Elements. You might want to increase a photo’s canvas size, for example, if you want to paint a frame around its edges without covering up any of the image.
You can take two approaches to changing image size. Before you can start, you need to figure out what you want to accomplish. First, if you want to change an image’s print size without messing around with its pixels, you can resize it without resampling it. Second, you can change an image’s pixel dimensions by resampling it to actually make it smaller or larger. Either way, this is all happening in the Editor.
Watch Out!
In general, you want to avoid resampling whenever possible because it requires Photoshop Elements to make guesses about what color each of the new pixels it creates will be. That means your image gets slightly distorted any time you resample it. Most of the time, it’s not noticeable, but it’s still better to keep this distortion from occurring in the first place.
To change print size without resampling, start by choosing Image, Resize, Image Size, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+I. Make sure Resample Image, at the very bottom of the Image Size dialog box, is not checked. Then, in the Document Size area, choose a unit of measurement from one of the pop-up menus (see Figure 4.9); the other menu automatically changes to match your choice.
Now you can change the Width measurement to the size you want; again, the Height measurement automatically changes. This happens because the Constrain Proportions box is automatically checked whenever Resample Image is not checked. Next, check the Resolution field to make sure the number isn’t lower than 150 or so. If it is, the image doesn’t contain enough pixels to be printed at the size you want, so you need to reduce the Width and Height measurements until the Resolution is acceptable. When you have the numbers the way you want them, click OK.
Before you change a photo’s canvas size, you need to decide three things: how much canvas you want to add, where it should be, and what color it should be. Start by choosing Image, Resize, Canvas Size. The Canvas Size dialog box’s Anchor proxy determines where the extra canvas will be added. The default is for the proxy to be centered, in which case the canvas is enlarged on all four sides (see Figure 4.10). You might want all your extra space at the bottom of the image, for example; in that case, click one of the arrows in the top row to move the proxy to the top.
Then choose a measurement unit from one of the pop-up menus; the other menu automatically matches it. If you want to enter the size of the extra canvas you’re adding, click Relative. Uncheck the box if you want to enter the total new canvas size. I usually use Relative when I’m adding canvas all the way around an image, as a border. I just enter the size of the border I want, times two (because the added canvas is split between the top and bottom and the left and right). Either way, enter your measurements.
The next step is to choose a Canvas Extension Color. Your choices are the Foreground color, the Background color, and white, black, gray, and Other, in which case the Color Picker opens so you can choose any color you want. After you make all your settings, click OK. Photoshop Elements makes the change. If you don’t like it, click the Undo arrow in the menu bar and try again.
Most of the work you’ll do in Photoshop Elements needs a photograph as a starting point, so in this hour, we looked at a few different ways to move photos onto your computer and into the Organizer. You learned how to transfer photos from a digital camera or a cell phone, how to scan images, and how to capture still images from a video clip. We also took a quick look at how to change the image and canvas size of those images when they’re in Photoshop Elements. In the next hour, we examine all the ways the Organizer helps you keep track of your photos.
Give these quiz questions a whirl; if you’ve read through this entire hour, you shouldn’t have any trouble with them. Then try out the activities before you move on to the next hour.
Grab your digital camera and take at least two dozen pictures. Of what, you ask? Anything! Find interesting views, colorful patterns, sentimental moments—whatever presents itself right here, right now. You never know what will turn out to be useful later. Then connect the camera to your computer and import the photos into Organizer.
Find your favorite wedding or prom photo, one you really like. Carefully blow off any dust, and then scan it. Make sure you have Photoshop Elements add the new image to the Organizer.
Use the Canvas Size dialog box to add a 1-inch white border around the edges of your scanned photo. Then play with the Painting tools to give it a colorful border. Save the new version of the photo with a different name.