Organization
Photoshop Elements 4.0 includes 3 tools for organizing. These tools all do the same thing. Don’t be confused….it’s marketing stuff.
The first thing you should be familiar with is saving your digital negatives. This is a very important thing to know. It’s not fun stuff, but it’s critical. If you don’t do this, you will regret it later, trust me.
Saving digital negatives is a very easy thing to do. Plug in your card reader. When you do this, the Photoshop Elements Photo Downloader will appear. Choose the photos you want downloaded, tell the computer where to put these photos, and then click “Get Photos” in the bottom right hand corner to transfer the photos from your memory card to your hard disk. Once these photos are imported, they are automatically loaded into the Photoshop Elements Organizer. Burn these to a CD…do it right now. I mean it. Do this right now, I’ll wait. Ok, done? This was done because you need to save these originals…these are your digital negatives. You want to save these so that they cannot be accidentally erased, or edited.
If you don’t have a CD burner, go buy one. That’s really an inexpensive and crucial storage option. To burn your photos to a CD, just open the File menu in the organizer, and choose Backup. This will bring up a Burn/Backup dialog box. Click the “Copy/Move Files” button, and then click Next. The next screen has the “Move Files” option, leave that unchecked, unless you want to backup your already edited files, and take them off of your computer. Select the destination drive, and click done, after inserting a blank CD. This will start burning the disc, then you will want to choose “verify” in the popup box, and click OK in the next box.
All done…you’ve learned how to backup your digital negatives. Take those CD’s and label them properly, and put them in a safe place, just like you would film negatives.