The Create and Share menus

When digital photography became mainstream 20 years ago, there were precious few things you could do with your images other than look at them on low-resolution screens—digital printing was in its infancy, as were reliable computers, the internet, and editing software.

It took programs such as Photoshop Elements to introduce us to the concept of doing something more than just looking at images on screen. It began with a few creative projects and is now driving a wide range of activities, ranging from book printing to slideshows, scrapbooking, and stationery:

Creative projects are an excellent way to perform relatively complex actions with ease. In the preceding screenshot, all I had to do was find eight images, open them, and choose Create | Photo Collage. The application automatically arranges the files according to the layout chosen in the right-hand panel and it's done. A time-consuming process performed automatically in less than a minute—genius!

Running through both the Organizer and all three edit modes, you'll spot the highly useful Create and Share menus. The Organizer is used as a media browser for still images, music files, and video clips, so it's designed to work with both Elements and its consumer video editing sibling, Premiere Elements. In it, you'll find a few additional features offered, in both the Create and Share menus, notably for producing video projects and uploading them to video-centric sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.

Otherwise, these two drop-down menus are identical, enabling users, after the editing is done, to incorporate them into one of the many creative projects offered, and then to share them immediately, directly out of Elements, with a range of social media platforms or local destinations such as the desktop.

Some of its original projects provide the user with great creative options; for example, anything from making a slideshow, photo collage, photo book, greeting card, or calendar, to producing your own instant movie, DVD labels, and photo prints. As indicated, its Share menu just provides you with the easy option of uploading your newly crafted work directly to Facebook, Twitter, email, Vimeo, YouTube, or the desktop.

It's possible to buy Photoshop Elements as a standalone photo editor but, as is often the case, it's also sold bundled with its moving-picture sibling, Adobe Premiere Elements, simply because the line between still images and video has become increasingly blurred (no pun intended). Let's take a brief look at what this video-editing powerhouse has to offer the budding filmmaker.