Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Opening Stored Images

If you've got photos already stored on your computer, you have several options for opening them with Elements. If the file format is set to open in Elements, just double-click the file's icon to launch Elements and open the image. (If you want to change which files automatically open in Elements, see the box on page 26. You've also got a few ways to open files from within Elements:

• From the Organizer (Windows only). Go to File → Get Photos → From Files and Folders, or press Ctrl+Shift+G, then select your file. The other options in the Get Photos menu (like opening files stored on a mobile phone) are covered in Appendix A.

• From the Editor (Mac and Windows). Go to File → Open or press Ctrl+O (⌘-O) and select your file. To bring up the Editor's File Browser so you can choose from a thumbnail view of your photos, press Ctrl+Shift+O (Shift-⌘-O) and navigate to the photo you want. There's more about the File Browser later in this chapter.

• From the Welcome window (Mac only). The Mac Welcome screen includes a list of recently opened photos, or you can click the Open File for Editing button to bring up the File Browser window.

Tip

Elements can open PDF files (choose File → Open), but if they're longer than one page, Elements lets you open only one page at a time. If you need to extract a particular graphic from a PDF file, or all the graphics from a multi-page PDF file, go to File → Import → PDF Image, and Elements extracts all the graphics from the file ...