Workspace basics

When you launch Elements, the Home screen helps you to easily get started with Photoshop Elements. The Home screen showcases a carousel of cards to help you discover new features, try out exciting features, and explore and personalize Auto Creations. You can also quickly search for Help resources of your desired features. The Home screen also allows you to start from scratch with one of the Elements applications.

To know more, see Get to know the Home screen.

Launch an Elements application

In the Home screen, you can click one of the following to launch the desired application:

• Organizer Select this option to launch Elements Organizer and import, tag, or organize your photos.
• Photo Editor Select this option to launch Adobe Photoshop Elements and enhance or add special effects to your photos.

After you launch an application, you can open the Home screen at any time from Help > Home Screen.

Workspace

Use Elements Organizer to find, organize, and share your photos and media files. In the Media view, you can view thumbnails of the media files you’ve imported. You can view a large thumbnail of a single media file or smaller thumbnails of many media files. You specify the thumbnail size by using the Zoom slider.

The Media view lists all the photos that you’ve imported. Imported items appear in one comprehensive view that you can easily browse and filter. It can even show thumbnails of files stored remotely, such as those files that you want to keep on CDs.

You can fix the most common problems in the media files by using the tools in the Instant Fix tab of the Task pane.

You can create projects, from printed photo books to slideshows, from the Create option in the Task pane.

Finally, you can share your photos and projects with others, by using any of the tools in the Share option of the Task pane.

The Elements Organizer workspace has the following components:

Contains menus for performing tasks. Elements Organizer organizes the menus by topic: File, Edit, Find, View, and Help.

Enter a criteria or select a particular search from the drop-down list to search for photos or media files.

Click Create to explore ways on how to create, creative projects using your media files. Click Share to see various ways in which you can share media files with friends and family.

Click Import to start importing media into Elements Organizer.

The Albums created or imported from previous version’s catalogs are displayed in the Albums panel. You can create albums and manage media inside the albums panel to organize media in Elements Organizer.

The Folders panel lists all the physical folders from which you have imported media to Elements Organizer. You can hide/show by clicking the respective buttons in the task pane.

You can give a star rating to your media files. This helps you sort and organize media. For example, you can give five stars to a photograph for various reasons such as it has your favorite subject or is an excellent photograph.

You can later then sort all such photos with a five star rating.

You can sort media in Elements Organizer by the following parameters:

• Newest: Orders the media by date from the most recent to the oldest
• Oldest: Orders the media by date from the oldest to the most recent
• Name: Orders the media alphabetically by name (A-Z)
• Import Batch: Orders the media by the batches in which they were imported

When you click Auto Curate, Elements Organizer smartly analyzes your photos and picks the best photos in just a click. To know more about Auto Curate, see Auto-curate your best photos.

Contains buttons to add places, people, events, and create slide shows. You can also launch Photo Editor for fixing photos from the Editor button.

Views in Elements Organizer

There are five views in Elements Organizer. The Views tab helps you organize and view your media based on the people present in the photos, places they were taken, and the events that are associated with the photos.

Initially, when you import media, the files are displayed in the Media view. You can then mark faces in the photos, identify places the photograph was taken at, and create event stacks. The four views are listed here:

The various media files are displayed in this view. You can view the files in this view, fix photos using Instant fix option, view information about specific files using Tags/info option, and perform other operations.

The people appearing on your photos can be marked. People’s view helps you arrange stacks based on the people identified in the photos.

Photographs have special association with the places they are taken at. You can tag locations to your photos in the Places view.

You can create stacks of events containing pictures of that event. For example, you can create an event Dan’s birthday and tag photos of that event.

Use context menus

You can use context menus in both the Editor and Elements Organizer workspaces. Context-sensitive menus display commands that are relevant to the active tool, selection, or panel.

Using keyboard commands and modifier keys

You can use keyboard shortcuts in both the Editor and Elements Organizer workspaces. Keyboard commands let you quickly execute commands without using a menu; modifier keys let you alter how a tool operates. When available, the keyboard command appears to the right of the command name in the menu.

Undo, redo, or cancel operations

Many operations can be undone or redone. Available memory limits your ability to use these options.

Exit Photoshop Elements

To exit Photoshop Elements, close each workspace - closing one does not automatically close another.