You’ve taken loads of photos with your digital camera and they’re stored on your Mac’s hard drive where no one can see them. Does this sound familiar to you? Do your photos need organization and editing but you don’t know where to start? This article is intended to provide some recommendations to help you get started editing digital photos with Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac version 4.0.

To get started, you need some digital photo editing software. I would recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac version 4.0, which is now available for Mac. It is compatible with the G series and the newer Intel Macs. Photoshop Elements is based on the market leading professional Adobe Photoshop software. Aimed at home digital photography enthusiasts, 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 designed, a great feature for beginners to digital photo editing is the use of descriptive icons, where you hover over an icon and it displays a description of its function. Organizing your photos is very easy. Elements lets you manage, sort, delete, and view your image collection in many different ways, including face tagging and keyword tagging. It also displays a comprehensive list of file properties for each of your images so you’ll never lose a photo on your hard drive again. Plus, a partnership between Adobe and Kodak gives you the opportunity to share photos online, print greeting cards, personalized calendars, or photo albums. Before ejecting the installation CD, be sure to copy the Goodies folder to your hard drive; contains loads of frames, backgrounds and extras to play with.

With Quick Fix you can perform basic editing functions to correct the most common digital photo flaws in one convenient location. With a couple of clicks, intelligent correction and automatic red-eye removal will give you a print-ready image. The most useful features are the skin tone adjustment tool, which makes skin tones appear more realistic, and the straighten tool, which allows you to straighten and crop crooked photos. A couple of more advanced features that are great are the magic selection brush and the magic extractor tool – I use them a lot in Photoshop CS2 and was very impressed with their performance in Photoshop Elements Mac Version 4.0. With the magic selection brush, you scribble on an object, and as long as there’s enough contrast between it and the background, Elements will select it for you. The magic extractor is even better; it’s simple to operate and allows you to separate objects from the background of an image in seconds with extreme precision (this works better than the extraction function in the full-priced Photoshop CS2, but don’t tell anyone I told you!).

So, for both the novice and the more advanced user, if you want to quickly and easily edit your photos with minimal effort and get them off your hard drive for people to see, Adobe Photoshop Elements Mac version 4.0 has it all. the features you need. You will ever need it and it is excellent value for money.