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Photoshop Elements Part I

Adobe Photoshop Elements
Part I

This month we will begin a four-part session on Adobe Photoshop Elements. Although we are centering the meetings on Elements, most of the techniques and tools we discuss also apply to programs such as Paint Shop Pro, Ulead Photo Impact and other advanced image editing programs.

Getting Started:

Before you begin using Elements or any image editing program it is important to get the monitor and program interface set up to make the program easier to use.

Our Top Internet Information Sites 2005

We started publishing this list about three years ago. I fully admit that I am an information junkie and enjoy finding the answers to questions as soon as they come up. I tend to use a core group of sites to find my information. In this list you will see some perennial favorites and some new ones that I started using over the past year.

In no particular order, my favorite information gathering web sites are:

  • Google – Hands down the best place to start when you are searching the Internet

All Search Results are NOT Created Equally

When you click on a link provided by a search engine for a medication you are taking
or maybe a popular TV show, there is a good chance that you may end up at a site
packed with spyware and/or viruses ready to pounce on your computer.

In this week’s tip, I don’t want to rant about viruses and spyware or even the nuances
of searching. All of these topics are thoroughly covered here at the web site. Instead,
I want to point out some general tips and ideas and to keep in mind when searching the
web…regardless of which search engine you choose.

*

Spelling is paramount. The degenerates who spread filth make a living on taking

Quick Tweaks to Make Windows Snap

When I make a house or office call during the week to work on a computer, I almost always run through a few quick tweaks to make Windows perform just a little bit better. No matter how new a computer may be, it can’t be too fast. Try these tweaks on your computer to see if you can eek out a little more performance.
Disable Visual Effects

Starting with Windows 98 Second Edition, Microsoft added visual effects to menus and windows that do nothing but make us wait a little longer to perform our computing tasks. To cut down on these visual effects, do the following:

1. RIGHT Click on a blank part of the desktop

Customize Office Toolbars

Starting with Microsoft Office 2000 and the XP version afterward, software engineers in Redmond decided that showing an entire menu in Word, Excel or any of the Office programs would confuse software users.

Instead of showing the entire menu when clicking on File, Edit, Format, etc, from the menus, we are presented with an abbreviated menu showing only two or three options. In order to view the entire menu, we can either wait a few seconds (who has that kind of time) or click on the double arrows at bottom of the menu.

Thankfully, you can reverse this process, if you wish. You can restore order to the Office menu system and view all the menus with a single click. Follow these steps for either Office 2000 or Office XP products (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Front Page, Access, Outlook (not Express), and Publisher):