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You’ve taken masses of photos with your digital camera and they are stashed away on your hard drive of your Mac where nobody can see them. Does this sound familiar? Do your photos need organising and editing but you don’t know where to begin? This article aims to provide some recommendations to help you get started in digital photo editing with Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0.

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 of Elements is easy to use and includes a great feature for the digital photo editing beginner which is the use of descriptive icons, where you move your mouse over an icon and it shows a description of what it does. Organizing your photos is also easy to do since Elements easily allows you manage, sort, delete and view your photo collection in many different ways including face tagging and keyword tagging. It also displays an extensive list of properties for each of your photos so you should be able to use the excuse that you have misplaced a photo on your hard drive again. Also, since there is a partnership between Adobe and Kodak you now have the opportunity to share your photos with family and friends online; you can also print greetings cards, custom calendars or photo books. A hint: before you remove the install disk you want to make sure you move the Goodies folder to your hard drive as it has a variety of frames, backgrounds and extras to play around with and add to your images.

A very handy feature is Quick Fix which allows you to perform basic editing functions which correct the most common digital photo flaws in one handy location. With a few mouse clicks smart fix and auto red-eye removal will give you a photo that is ready to print. A few other functions include the straighten tool which gives you the ability to straighten and crop crooked photos and the skin tone adjustment tool, which makes skin tones appear more life-like. A few of the more advanced features include the magic selection brush and magic extractor tool - I have used them often in Photoshop CS2 and am quite impressed with how well they performed in Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0. The magic selection brush allows you to scribble on an object and, if there is enough contrast between it and the background, Elements will select it for you. The magic extractor is even better; this tool is easy to use and allows you to separate objects from the background of an image extremely accurately in seconds (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 even the more advanced user, if you want to edit your photos quickly and easily with very little work, and finally remove them from your hard drive, Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0 offers all the functionality you’ll ever need and is excellent value for money.