Pablo Averbuj

Photoshop Elements

I don’t think I’ve ever had to deal with this many pictures in such a brief period of time. In less than a week I had to deal with: 1200 pictures from our pre-wedding picture session, 2200 pictures from the wedding, and another 1600 pictures from our honeymoon. And all at least 6 megapixel (I think it exceeded 10 gigabytes). It made me glad I ordered a new drive for the NAS before we left (we were nearly out of space and we still hadn’t transferred all the wedding video which will probably be another 20 gigabytes or so, but I digress).

Photoshop Album (PSA) was not very happy with me and it was getting long in the tooth, especially in terms of software age. I downloaded the trial of Photoshop Elements (PSE) from the Adobe site and I have to say I was pretty impressed. The organizer in PSE has some improvements I’ve been longing for, like excluding tags from a search query. It also added star ratings (in PSA it was either a favorite or not, PSE has 1-5 star system), and the integrated editor has almost all of the features of full photoshop and more; it has a feature to auto-straighten images, which comes in handy with my congenital inability to take horizontal images (Pablo’s CrookedPix[tm]).

Tagging the honeymoon pictures was pretty staright forward, probably took me an hour or two. There was a very limited set of people in the pictures, so it was fast going. The wedding pictures are another matter entirely. It took me two or three nights to get through the important pictures, and I still have 550 pictures of people dancing that I need to tag.

I ended up buying the full version of PSE, since Lightroom isn’t quite yet ready (in truth, I haven’t had a chance to play with Beta 4 very much, but it still doesn’t respond swiftly enough for me. But now I’ll have to figure out how to get the tags from PSE into Lightroom when Lightroom is ready. I saw a message on the Lightroom forums that PSE can export the tags into the EXIF data (thank you Adobe!) and Lightroom is smart enough to read the tags in, so I might be saved!

I’ll be putting up the vacation pictures in my gallery, and the wedding pictures at the wedding website.

Photoshop Elements feature I like:

• Nice panorama merging (see gallery soon)
• Export tags to EXIF
• Exclude a tag from search results
• Multi-star rating system (wonder if thise exports Lightroom as well)
• Edit versioning!