To begin with you need some digital photo editing software. I would recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0, which is now available for the Mac. It is compatible with G-series as well as the new Intel Macs. Photoshop Elements is based on the market-leading professional Adobe Photoshop software. Aimed at the home digital photo enthusiast, elements performs basic photo editing tasks quickly and easily and there are also many sophisticated Photoshop features available to you at the click of a mouse.
The interface is clear and well laid out, a great feature for the digital photo editing beginner is the use of descriptive icons, where you hang your mouse over an icon and it shows a description of its function. Organising your photos is a snap, Elements allows you to manage, sort, delete and view your picture collection in many different ways including face tagging and keyword tagging. It also displays an exhaustive list of file properties for each of your images so you’ll never misplace a photo on your hard drive again. Also, a partnership between Adobe and Kodak gives you the opportunity to share photos online, print greetings cards, custom calendars or photo books. Before you eject the install cd, make sure you copy the Goodies folder to your hard drive – it contains loads of frames, backgrounds and extras to play around with.
With Quick Fix you can perform basic editing functions to correct the most common digital photo flaws in one handy location. With a couple of clicks, smart fix and auto red-eye removal will give you an image that is ready to print. More handy functions are the skin tone adjustment tool, which makes skin tones appear more life-like and the straighten tool which gives you the ability to straighten and crop crooked photos. A couple of more advanced features which are very cool are the magic selection brush and magic extractor tool – I use them a lot in Photoshop CS2 and was extremely impressed with how they performed in Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0. With the magic selection brush, you scribble on an object and, providing there is enough contrast between it and the background, Elements will select it for you. The magic extractor is even better; it is simple to operate and allows you to separate objects from the background of an image in seconds extremely accurately (this works better than the extract function in the full-priced Photoshop CS2 – but don’t tell anyone I told you!).
So, for the beginner or more advanced user alike, if you want to edit your photos quickly and easily with the minimum of fuss, and get them off your hard drive for people to see, Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0 offers all the functionality you’ll ever need and is excellent value for money.