Book Image

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 - Third Edition

By : Robin Nichols
Book Image

Mastering Adobe Photoshop Elements 2021 - Third Edition

By: Robin Nichols

Overview of this book

Managing thousands of images while producing perfectly edited results is now a must-have skill for online bloggers, influencers, vloggers, social media users, and photography enthusiasts. Photoshop Elements helps you to manage this easily and boost your creative output. This third edition is updated with Elements 2021’s latest features and focuses on Adobe's AI-powered features along with the entire creative workflow. Each chapter is designed to help you get the most out of your image files in an easy way. You’ll learn how to add significant visual improvements to your work using no more than a few one-click edits with AI-driven features and manual adjustments. The book is filled with useful instructions to guide you seamlessly through the often complex processes, tools, and features in Photoshop Elements. Finally, you’ll cover everything from developing your organizational skills through to creating remarkable special effects, complex text, image combinations, and eye-popping visual techniques using both AI-driven features as well as manually operated tools. By the end of this Photoshop Elements book, you'll have learned how to leverage the impressive tools available in Photoshop Elements 2021, and use them to greatly improve your photo editing and image retouching skills.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Searching for pictures using Metadata

Metadata is little more than a small text file that records all your camera details at the time a photo is taken. We rarely read the metadata unless we specifically look for it or, in this context, use it to search for images. Metadata records camera and lens details, date, time, size, resolution, filename, and if your camera has the feature, a set of GPS coordinates.

The advantage of metadata is that the information already exists, so we can use Organizer to search our image database using any of those pre-recorded metadata details for a fast result.

You might consider that the Find by Details (Metadata) search field looks a bit confusing because it offers so many ways to search for images. You can also use this dialog box to save frequently used searches—a real time-saver. It can also be used to search for images by the date and time captured (This is especially useful if you holiday in different time zones).

Metadata search: By selecting Find>By Details (Metadata), you see this screen. By default it opens with Search for files which match any of the following search criteria (by capture date—which you choose using the drop-down menu). This is a very wide type of search but as you'll discover, you can click that left-hand menu to see 36 other search options. As I write a lot about camera technique, I often search for specific things such as aperture (f-stop), ISO setting, focal length, and White Balance, which makes the task of trawling through hundreds of potential image files a breeze.

Another criterion I use a lot is to search for camera type, or the date taken—but if you are more interested in searching for people, for example, you can also access all of Elements' other methods of search, including People tags, Event tags, and of course, keywords. If what you find in the menu is not specific enough, add a second or a third 'search rule' by clicking the + button that sits to the right of the Search Criteria window.

Quick information: The Information panel shown here shares space in the right-hand panel with Tags, and is quite comprehensive—there's a compact version and an extended version (seen here, currently occupying the entire right-hand panel).

Above that is the General menu (for the purposes of this illustration, it's floating over the thumbnail picture grid, to the left of the extended Information panel). This displays a few snippets of that file's metadata, as well as the star rating and where it physically resides on your hard drives. Interestingly, the information displayed here is somewhat truncated when compared to the full search capabilities displayed through the Find menu—but nevertheless, it's a good place to start your search.

Tip:

Right-clicking any thumbnail and choosing Delete from Catalog brings up a dialog window asking if you also want to physically delete the original file from wherever it might be stored. This is handy if you think it really needs to go!

Tip:

You can take your keywording as far as you have the time and patience for by being increasingly specific. For example, I could also keyword my holiday pictures with the words beaches, restaurants, funny signs, people, markets, night life, sunsets, palm trees, cocktails, and so on.

If you add multiple keywords, separate them with a comma (,) to avoid confusing the search engine. Limit keywords to five or six per image. Too many keywords can be counter-productive.