Tutorial 1

The new Photoshop Elements 15 Organizer is smart enough to tell a dog from a goat, explains James Paterson

The Organizer’s new Smart Tag and Quick Fix features explored

The Photoshop Elements Organizer has a grand ambition, a goal that many of us thought would be forever out of reach. It’s there to bring order out of chaos – that chaos being your image library.

If, like many of us, your photos are scattered across numerous folders and drives, finding the image you want can often be a chore. But if you’re an Elements user who knows how to utilize the Organizer to the full, then things get a lot easier. If you’ve used previous versions of the Elements Organizer you’ll already know about its many sorting skills, from ordering your photos by date, location or rating, to detecting, recognizing and grouping different faces.

In version 15 of Photoshop Elements, the Organizer is smarter than ever. In previous versions, tagging images involved manually adding metadata and keywords. With Elements 15, the Organizer automatically creates ‘smart tags’ by analysing images for all manner of common subjects and themes. Not only can it detect animals, it can tell the difference between a dog and a goat. It recognizes events such as birthdays and weddings, and tags places like beaches and farms. It even adds a tag for images it deems to be ‘beautiful’. Of course, like all automated features it’s by no means perfect, but in most cases it analyses correctly – and when it does go wrong, it’s very easy to fix.

Alongside the new Smart Tags feature is another useful tool – Instant Fix – which comes in handy for quick edits and effects. We’ll talk you through these two impressive new features.