Tag Your It

We have talked about organizing our photos, but we can also tag them. And why might you want to tag a photo? So that if you are looking for a particular photo you can find it more easily.

There are several ways to accomplish this. Today we will go over how you can do it within PSP X3. The first thing you will have do is click on the organizer tab in the top right corner.


Click on "Browse More Folders" then the arrow next to "computer" to find the drive and folder where your photos are located.


Once you click on your folder, it will put a quick link on the left and show the pictures within the folder at the bottom.


Click on a picture at the bottom to open it in the workspace. On the right side choose a rating (1 star for a poor picture, 5 for an excellent picture). Type in a one or two word tag (i.e. Pan, etc) and enter. Once you have finished entering the tags, you can put in a caption then click the green apply button at the bottom.


Suggested tags: the name of the persons in the photo, special occasions (i.e. Christmas, Spring Break, etc.). You will surely come up with more that fit your needs.

Now when I go to the organizer and am looking for a picture of Pan, I can click on the "Pan" tag and all the pictures of him in the folders where I have used tags will show up at the bottom.


If you have several pictures that would have the same tag, just click on the first one, then hold down the control key and chose the rest. I would wait to add the rating and the caption though unless each is exactly the same. And sometimes a caption isn't even needed.


Pretty cool huh? If you are like me and have thousands of pictures to tag, this may take some time. I suggest whenever you have a free moment that you take a moment to tag a folder or two.

For those who use Photoshop or Elements, I suggest you sign up for the Scrapgirls newsletters and check out their past newsletters.

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I need a storage unit

I know we have talked about photo organization, at least I thought we had, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.

So this is going to be a quick "how I do it".

And just remember you may have a better way, you may prefer to use the software that comes with your camera (my & the Bug's other sister uses this way), etc. Maybe Bug can post in the comments how she goes about saving her pictures (or another post.)

I have a folder on one of my drives called "PHOTOGRAPHS". Real unique huh?


Within that folder I have more folders with years on them. (I know, I know, I have other folders, but they are like holding folders until I get them placed)


Within the year folders I have the date folders. I always date the folder according to the date of the picture and with a brief description (we'll be going into tagging next time). You may notice that some days have #1, #2, etc. I will do this if there are different things going on within the same day, a different camera was used, if they are scans or if someone else gave me photos. If someone else gives me the photos I will usually name the folder like this "2010-04-24 XXX pool". There are some copyright rules about using someone else's photos, including if it is a child who took the picture or someone else who took it with your camera. Best to keep track of it all.


You can also select the photos then right click and bring up the properties dialog box. Click on details tab and in the copyright field put in the name of the photographer. Downside is that you would have to check the properties of each picture if you wanted to see if someone else took it. Just easier to give them their own folder.


When plugging my camera into the computer I comes up with the following dialog box. My choice will be Open device to view files.


Having made a new folder and opening the device I will select the photo(s) and right click, choosing Cut.


Clicking in my new dated folder, I right click and choose paste. This will delete it from my camera and place it in my new folder.


As I said before there are numerous ways that you can use to download and store your photos. But whatever way you opt to use, make sure you back them up to an external hard drive and make cd copies. Don't depend on just cds for your storage media. I don't know if you can tell or not but on the second image above is a folder called Recovered. I had a cd go bad and had to purchase special software to try and retrieve it. While I saved some, I still lost quite a bit. Remember: BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP.

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Tic Tac Toe - or what in the world do you mean a third

I'm still playing with this whole camera challenge thingie.  Tink convinced me to try the Gotta Pixel Project 52 Challenge.  This time was the 'Rule of Third'.   She told me it is to make it more visually appealing.  I must say... she was right.  Here is my entry to the challenge.

This is a picture of my son's artwork from school.  It is a bird.  And I like it better set off to the side than if it had been dead center.  Just a ton more of these to do to catch up.

Express Lab - Color Balance

This time open you photo in PSP. Then View>Express Lab. Click on the Color Balance icon.


Moving the slider to the left (increasing the value) adds blue to the overall color of the photo making it cooler, toning down the reds, oranges and yellows.


Moving it to the right (decreasing the values) adds red to the overall color making for a warmer photo.


Using the color balance in the Express Lab will be very useful for those pictures in which there is a blue or red color cast that you want subdue.

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Express Lab - Smart Photo Fix

Today we will be working with the Express Lab that comes with PSP X2 and X3 (it may come with other versions as well, I just don't have them installed any longer).

Open the Express Lab (View>Express Lab). Click on Get Photos button on bottom right corner and open photo that you would like to improve. Click on the Smart Photo Fix icon. The white box with the grey "mountain" to the right is a histogram. For a more detailed explanation, please check out The Luminous Landscape's article "Understanding Histograms".


You can use the "Suggest Settings", which will automatically chose what the program thinks are the best settings for your photo. (NOTE: The red "mountain" shows the new setting, leaving the grey to show the original, so you can see how it has been changed.)


If you don't like these settings hit the reset and then you can manually adjust the brightness, shadows, highlights and saturation.

Brightness: Move slider to the left dulls the photo; to the right brightens the photo.
Shadows: Moving slider to the left will make the shadows darker; to the right makes them lighter (you may want to move to the right if there is detail in the shadow that you want to bring out.)
Highlights: Moving slider to the left will make the highlights duller; to the right will brighten them.
Saturation: Moving slider to the left will desaturate (take the color out) of the photo; to the right will increase the color saturation.


In the original the colors were just a tad dull. Using the suggested I felt the highlights were blown out. But a little manual tweaking made the colors pop and the photo crisp and clean.


One of the challenges this month at Gotta Pixel was the lyric challenge, but instead of them providing the lyric, you were to chose a song from 2010 that touched you. I chose "In Darkness and In Light" by The Maine.

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