Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 Creating a Photo Book, Part 1

Hi, everyone--Michael Brown back with you again; welcome back to Educator.com's Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 course!0000

You have learned all of the tools, techniques, and features, and ways to modify, adjust--selections, corrections, retouch, and manipulation--to make your images great, make composites...all sorts of options for that.0007

In these series of lessons, now, I'm showing you some creative ideas to stimulate your own personal artistic vision.0023

In Adobe Photoshop Elements (and Photoshop doesn't even have these), we have options to create items: prints--just standard printing, but photo books, greeting cards, photo calendars, collages, CD jackets, DVD jackets, and labels--kind of cool.0030

The Create menu appears in here, in the Editor, as well as in the Organizer.0047

What we're going to do here (in this lesson and the next lesson): it's a two-part lesson on creating a photo book.0055

Photo books are high-quality books that you can put on your coffee table; if you are a professional photographer or a graphic designer, you can actually make a portfolio that you can utilize to help you in your work.0063

These books are super quality, so it really helps you.0094

In this lesson, we're going to talk about preparing the images that you want for the book, creating a new album in Organizer, and arranging the images in the order that you want (you don't have to do it perfectly, but by arranging them in Organizer, when it loads them up in the template, it will be generally what you want and save you some time--you can actually modify it within, once you get them up there).0099

We're going to talk about photo book basic layout options--again, there are a series of templates that are available.0103

You get the one that is the closest to what you might like, and you can modify it and customize it as you go.0112

And, we'll take a look at the Photo Book workspace.0118

Let's go ahead and get started, and let's go over to the Organizer.0121

Now, the first thing that you want to do is to get all of the images that you want to put into the photo book, put them into a separate folder somewhere, and then you want to import them into the Organizer.0125

Now, here is the folder that contains all of the images that I have selected, that I might use for this photo book.0138

The reason I have made (and you're going to need to make) an album--same images--is that you can open these images in Editor, but for the photo book, if you want to arrange your images in an order that you want them to appear in the book, rather than the order that they are in the folder--if you click and drag an image, you get this "No" icon: you cannot adjust and rearrange the order of the images in a folder.0145

That is the physical image, in a folder, somewhere on your computer.0176

What you want to do is: you take the folder and create an album--and you remember how to do that in Organizer--the plus sign, New Album; highlight the images, drag them in, put them wherever you want to...0182

I have already created an album, last night, for this lesson, and here are the images now.0192

Remember, these are not the actual images; they are proxy thumbnails that are connected to the images in the folder in your computer.0197

Here they are, and I have already prearranged them pretty much in the order that I want.0205

Let's see if we can change or modify any of these.0211

For example, I might want to take this image here and use it as my headline image; it's a gorgeous image.0215

I can rearrange it simply by grabbing the image and dragging it.0226

Notice, the plus sign allows me to move images; now, it's the first image in line, and it's a lot like this one, so I'm going to change the order here, and these look pretty good.0230

This one, perhaps, I would move--no, I think I will leave it that way.0242

Scroll down; I'm looking in here; here is a composite that I may not want to be part of the photo book at all.0246

So, I can do this (and here is something--just a reminder about Organizer): I'll highlight the image, and I'll hit--on a Mac, Delete; on a PC, backspace.0255

The selected item will be deleted from the catalogue, and it said, "Also delete from the hard disk?"0267

I don't want to do that; when it says "Deleted from the catalog," that means from the Organizer; it will take it out of this album, as well as out of the folder, but it still resides in the computer.0273

I'm going to go ahead and click OK; that one disappeared.0290

I want to show you: down in the folder, you will not see that orange rear view of that Corvette, but it's still in...0293

And I'll show you: Import from Files and Folders, and we'll go down here, and let me show you--let me find the Corvette; there it is, right there; there is the thumbnail.0303

If I get the media, it comes back in.0314

Go back to the Organizer, and I'm going to put it...it's in that folder now; it should be...let's put it in the folder, right there.0318

We take a look; now we go down in the folder, and there it is, back in, but it does not reside in this album.0328

Just a reminder on how you delete images.0338

So now, we have the images generally organized, and what I'm going to do for the original example here is: I'm just going to select a few images.0341

I'll highlight the first; we'll do all of these landscape images, just for the fun of it--3, 5, 7, 9 images.0350

Now, you have your images highlighted right here in the Organizer; we won't go back to the Editor, because we don't want to open up the images that are in the Editor for Create.0358

The Create button here will open up these images; if I do it over in the Editor, only the images that are open in the Editor will come in.0368

So, we're here in the Organizer and have our images highlighted; go to the Create button; go to Photo Book; and it's going to think; here comes the photo book template page.0379

On the left side, we have sizes available; Print Locally means you're going to print it on your computer.0391

I really don't suggest this at all, because all of these albums, as you see going through--they're printed on both sides.0396

You're going to have to flush print pages that can be two-sided printing; then you'll have to figure out how to bind them yourself...believe me, unless you own a bindery, this is not what you want to do.0406

Here we have one of the outside vendors, Shutterfly, that has worked with Adobe, and they are represented right here in Photoshop Elements.0418

They have three sizes available: 8x8, 11x8, and 12x12; we'll go with the 11x8.0427

That is what it's going to look like; there is the binding quality--absolutely super job stuff.0433

It doesn't cost a lot of money.0439

You can save your photo book out as a particular type of file; that is what you do anyway; if you choose another vendor, you can send them the same file, so you don't necessarily have to work with Shutterfly--but they do a great job, and their prices are good.0440

All right, so we have selected the size; Auto Fill with Selected Images (that is the images that we have in the Organizer); automatically, they require a 20-page book if you're going to do it, so the number of pages autofills with a minimum of 20.0458

If you have more images than that, you can add pages to it as you go.0475

Or, to start with, just type in your own number.0480

So we have that: now we're going to pick a theme, and let's click here, and see--it shows you what this particular book is going to look like in its layout, and we have a whole series of themes here.0482

Now, for me personally, as a professional photographer, I would utilize the Monochrome: watch--it's clean; it's white or black with the images--that is the way a portfolio should look: perfectly clean for presentation.0495

But, in this case, just to show you how we can change things around, let's go with (what was the one for family--let's see how that looks--is it clean?--it has a bunch of stuff on it; let's try to find a designer...modern...see what that one looks like; designer casual...) Designer Modern; let's just try this one; it's OK.0511

We're going to go ahead and take that and click OK.0539

Now, it's going on to the Internet; you need to be connected to the Internet, because it's downloading this template from Shutterfly; and there you have it.0544

What you see right now is the title page, and you see all of the various pages that have been filled.0554

Notice, the first three pages are filled, and the remainder are blank templates that you can fill later.0560

All right, so what we're going to do first of all: this is the general layout; this is the workspace, now, for Photo Book.0567

Let's take a look at it: on the left side, we have a Zoom tool, Hand tool to move things around, the Move tool to move the specific layers, a Type tool--just your basics.0576

We are in the Basic mode right here, and we have Advanced mode, and it's showing the safe zone--notice the little blue lines--this is safe for printing.0586

You always want to have a little extra outside for trim, because it might shift ever so slightly.0598

So, when you are doing layouts and graphics, this is traditional that you have a safe zone; it's kind of nice to see it, but we can turn it off for the time being.0606

In fact, you can see that the frame for this particular layout--notice, the line runs through it--so this needs to be sized down anyway.0614

All right, so we'll leave that on; you also can go from page to page by hitting the arrows or clicking on the pages, so you have that option.0625

Zooming is zooming this in or out, or typing in the zoom that you want.0634

We also have the option of looking at pages, different layouts, and graphics; this is how we customize things.0641

You can order, save, and close; and I want to show you, in the Photo Tool Bin: right now, you see the collection of images that we have here, and it is showing the open files.0650

This one is open, and the title is open in Editor; if we click on the dropdown, you can show the files selected in the Organizer, and there are our images that are residing now in this particular layout, and we have more than this--but you see that we have the scrollbar, and there is another line for the images that are in there.0663

You can also have the option of opening up any of a number of other albums to add images to this particular photo book.0688

We have the option, here, to show a grid, and that is pretty much it: the Photo Bin, Tool Options, Undo/Redo, go back to Organizer, and print directly from here.0703

We have taken a look, now, at preparing your images; why you need to create an album so you can rearrange them; and how to rearrange your images.0715

We have looked at the basic layout options and, generally, the Photo Book workspace.0725

That wraps up Part 1 of this.0732

Come back in Part 2, and we will take and work the photo book around to get it the way you would like it and show you how to output it.0734

I'll see you back in Part 2!0742