Although we take computers much for granted these days, using such a machine to store, process, and edit high-resolution stills and video data requires a totally different set of features compared to a machine that's only used for web browsing, social media, emailing, or downloading music.

Although the compatibility of Windows and Mac computers used to be very minimal, their operating systems are now far more user-friendly, both in the way third-party hardware interacts (such as external drives) and in that most software is now shared between the two systems.

Operating system wars: Is there really a difference between running Elements on a Windows or Mac computer? The answer to this question can get you into a lot of hot water, depending on the technical leaning of the person being asked. I have used Windows and Mac desktops and laptops for a long time and find that, when editing images, there's really no big difference in performance between the two operating systems. In the early years, Elements was a different application on a Mac because Adobe was in contention with Apple over iPhoto (being the default image browser), but that's all sorted now. Macs are certainly beautifully designed, but provided that you have the same processing power, RAM chips, graphics card, and screen resolution set, you'd be hard-pushed to pick out any real performance difference. However, you will experience a significant cost difference between the two platforms. Macs have always sold at a premium compared to Windows gear.

An imaging computer needs to have a very fast processor (the central processing unit (CPU)). This is the bit that does all the calculations. A computer with one of the latest CPU chips installed will certainly future-proof your investment for several years to come. That said, I don't advise you to purchase the very latest technology, simply because you'll pay an absolute premium for it without necessarily gaining a commensurate speed advantage. Such is the downside of being an early adopter.

It's better to buy something that is just about to be replaced—which means it might only be five months old—and spend the cash saved on installing additional memory (also called random access memory or RAM). The more memory installed, the more images, video clips, and applications you can have running at the same time without the computer visibly struggling. I'd recommend at least 16 GB of RAM to start with, and more if you can afford it.

Currently, screen resolutions are impressively high, with 4K (3,840 x 2,160 pixels) and now 5K (5,120 x 2,880 pixels) curved and flat screens becoming the norm. A flat screen is best for your imaging needs. Curved screens certainly appear tempting but, because of their shape, will never give accurate feedback when trying to adjust characteristics like proportion and perspective. The size of the screen you have is also partially dictated by the capability of the computer's graphics card. That said, most pre-installed graphics cards are powerful and easily capable of running a very high-resolution 4K or 5K screen, and in many models, even two screens at the same time.

Monitor quality: The best image editing computer monitors are made by Eizo—these have superb edge-to-edge brightness, are easily (color-) calibrated, come with a hood, and produce reliable, accurate color. They are expensive, so are only practical if you plan on running a business. If you want to save some money, look at buying a monitor from Dell, Ben-Q, or even LG, three companies that produce pretty good display products that are considerably more affordable.

Most computers sold off the shelf contain the minimum amount of RAM to keep the cost down. For maximum performance, it pays to top up the RAM, either at the point of purchase, or later, where you might save money buying it from the local computer shop or online. Increasing the amount of RAM significantly improves computer performance—even in an older computer it can be hugely beneficial—almost giving it a new lease of life (note that not all Mac models can be upgraded so check with a professional first).

If it's an entry-level video card not suited to a high-resolution output, you might encounter a lot of onscreen flickering, which can be quite disturbing. Check carefully before you buy.

Small but sweet - SSD drives: For absolute speed freaks, solid state drives (SSDs) are the best option – both as an internal drive in your Windows or Mac, and also as an external option. Expensive and not as high in capacity as their older SATA drive companions, SSDs are small, light, require no additional power, and are incredibly fast.

Then there is the very real problem of storage. Most photographers are prolific shooters and, with consumer camera resolutions generally passing the 25 megapixel mark at present, it won't take long to fill the computer's hard drive with media.

My advice is always to use a desktop computer, Windows or Mac, because, though large and bulky, they are significantly cheaper than laptops.

Removable desktop hard drives: The device on the left is a single hard drive unit from LaCie (the company has a unique Porsche-style design for its products). A single drive, such as this 6 TB model, would suit most beginners. The Western Digital My Book Duo, shown in the middle, is a RAID drive containing two hard drive units in the one box. This offers a mirroring feature, where it backs up two copies of everything, or it can be programmed for extreme speed if this is needed. The unit on the right is by a company called Drobo—this is another RAID storage-style drive suited for heavy users. Drobo claim its drives are significantly smarter than standard RAID drives (RAID technology has been around for more than two decades), providing sophisticated backup for professional image makers and small businesses. The idea behind this type of system is that it is integral to your workflow and can grow with your requirements. A device such as this is a must if you are starting your own imaging business.

Apart from that, their size (notably for Windows PCs) permits the addition of further internal hard drives when more storage is needed and even the upgrading of internal components such as video cards and motherboards for improved performance. Mac desktop computers are a little harder to upgrade internally partly because of their design, and partly because, if you do, you might void your warranty.

Desktop hard drives are the perfect way to keep up to date with backups – they are relatively inexpensive for the capacity offered, and if one fills up, it's easy enough to buy another. There are a number of excellent devices currently available from Seagate, LaCie, and Western Digital, to name a few.

Best practice is to install just your operating system and software applications onto the computer's hard drive. Everything else – photos, music, and video – is saved to an external hard drive, or drives. That way, your computer can run at its optimum, while accessing your photo library on an external drive. Once that external drive is full, it's simple enough to carry on with a second, or even a third, external hard drive.

Other software: I appreciate suggesting "other" photo editing software is not a politically correct thing to do in a book written around Photoshop Elements. But in fact there are many other software apps on the market that can do certain things, such as HDR (high dynamic range image making), far, far better than Elements. To give you an idea, three products come to mind that will extend your image making capabilities significantly:

HDR - Aurora HDR Professional (by Skylum)

Painterly effects - Dynamic Auto Painter (by Mediachance)

Best plug-in range - JixPix

Laptop issues: If you absolutely have to use a laptop (and a lot of photographers are entirely mobile these days), this is also a good option, although its storage space, computing power (CPU), and screen size will all be compromised unless you spend a lot of money. One answer is to buy several external storage drives and a large desktop screen that can be hooked up to the laptop when you are working locally in the home office.

Laptops are designed to be lightweight and compact, so there's never much storage space in them for all your files. Typically, we would buy a portable USB-powered hard drive for backups while traveling. Once home, it might make better sense to transfer all your work from the USB-powered hard drive to a physically larger desktop drive—these are usually cheaper, have a far greater data capacity, and are (mostly) more reliable.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Photoshop Elements General Features Overview, when images are imported into the Elements Organizer, they are not physically copied into the application; they are just linked from the place where they are stored (typically, this is the Pictures folder) to the Organizer. Should Elements or your computer develop a technical issue and you have to delete and reinstall the application, you just need to reinstate the catalog from the backup version, and it automatically re-links all files. Sometimes, it's necessary to actually point the program to the hard drive where the images are stored, but as often as not, Elements will search and find every image that was previously linked in the catalog. It's a clever program.

Import: Using the Import button (on the top left-hand side in the Organizer), you can bring images, audio, or video clips into the Elements Organizer directly using the From Files and Folders option. These files can physically reside anywhere – locally, on the computer, or externally on a drive. There are also options to import files directly from a camera or a card reader, or in bulk from pre-organized folders. The panel on the right-hand side of the main window holds both keyword and metadata information about each file. Click the small Keyword/Info button on the lower right-hand side of the main screen to open/close this panel.

Because of this linking process, it's not advisable to rename or move files that have already been imported into Elements. If files are moved or renamed using the Windows Explorer or Mac's Finder, the next time Elements starts, it will prompt you that the file is missing and immediately start a search for the file. This is fine if the name remains the same, but if it has a new name, it will have to be re-imported. You can leave Elements to complete the search, or do it yourself, if you know where the file was moved to. How long Elements takes to locate a moved file depends on how big your photo collection is.

The import process is fast because Elements only copies thumbnails and the metadata (essentially text) when it forms a link to the original files. So, to avoid wasting time searching for files that have been renamed or moved after they were imported into the Organizer, it makes sense to sort out the storage hierarchy on the computer or external drives before importing to the application.

We all have different ways with which to organize our busy photographic lives. Some prefer to store files by date, others prefer to name everything according to events in their lives. There's no right or wrong way to do this. The best method is the one that you are going to remember.

Making albums: In this screenshot, I have created an album called Animals. Selecting the album on the left-hand side of the window will display the contents of that album in the main window. As with most features in Elements, an album can be renamed at any time. The huge advantage of creating albums, apart from enabling you to easily compartmentalize your work into smaller, more practical collections, is that you can have the same image or images in multiple albums without increasing the space taken up on the storage drive.

Tip:

Before you import a second batch of images, it makes sense to sort out the first batch, because if you continue to import folder after folder of images, before long, you'll have thousands displayed in the main screen, and that can get very confusing. Once imported into the Organizer, you can see exactly where on your hard drives those imported files reside through the Folders menu in the left-hand bin.

That said, there are basic rules I can suggest that will make the editing process flow better:

• Download and organize your files into pre-made folders as often as you can. If you download on a regular basis, it will help you keep abreast of the Elements imports and will also ensure that you don't accidentally overwrite files on a camera memory card.
• Always add keyword tags to freshly imported files. The longer you leave organizing your work, the more confusing it gets.
• Divide your images into events—these might be "work", "trips", "family", "weekends away", and so on. Create an album for each big trip, an album for a conference, an album for the kid's birthdays, and so on. These are essentially virtual folders that are used for compartmentalizing image files inside Photoshop Elements. Dragging image thumbnails to populate these albums doesn't alter the location of the originals.
• Use keywords, tags, and star ratings to help you sort images into a sense of order that you can work with (I particularly like ranking images according to keywords and the star attribute hierarchy because they are easy to do).

Auto Curate: Photoshop Elements has a number of quite powerful but often overlooked features – including this one, called Auto Curate, highlighted here in red, which picks the top 500 images from the Organizer. The results might surprise you. With your media displayed in the main window, check the Auto Curate box and watch as Elements finds 50 of the best images from anything up to 20,000 images (according to Adobe). As I think most of the images in my test media are good anyway, it's a mystery how it finds 50 (or any number you choose) of the best. Nonetheless, this is worth a look for a quick, frustration-free selection.

• Give everything a proper name once it is edited
• As new images appear in the Organizer, they show up in the main window as thumbnails. Make the thumbnails bigger/smaller using the zoom slider at the bottom right-hand side of the screen. Use the edge-of-screen sliders to scroll down the page to see more thumbnails, or just use the up/down keyboard arrows.
• All the details of this filing system (albums, tags, keywords, thumbnails, original files, and so on) are part of the Elements catalog, which is something that needs backing up to a location different to where the original files are stored.

Some photographers prefer to divide image collections into multiple catalogs. For example, wedding photographers might have a separate catalog for each client. For most of us, one catalog is enough because you can only open one catalog at a time anyway.

Nearly all DSLRs and mirrorless cameras use the JPEG and RAW file formats. Most of the cheaper point-and-shoot type cameras only use JPEGs. That said, JPEGs can be opened and read by a very wide range of applications—photo software and even Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. RAW files are far less universal and require a specific software to work. In Elements this is called Camera RAW. As each new camera model produces an entirely new type of RAW file, Elements has to be updated reasonably regularly so it can keep up to date with all the new stuff coming on to the market. If you have just bought a new camera, don't be surprised if Elements cannot read its RAW files. You might have to wait till the next Adobe Camera RAW update before the application can open them. In the interim, you can always use the software that came with the camera to open RAW files or download the free Adobe DNG file format converter, convert your RAW files to the DNG format and edit from those till the new software is ready.

Looking at your media in the Organizer couldn't be easier. The main window displays all media files in a mode called Grid View—these are adjustable-size thumbnails. But note that if you create and populate albums, the main window will only display the contents of each album.

Compartmentalizing a photo collection into multiple albums, therefore, is an effective way to break up what would otherwise be a confusing mass of files populating (or flooding) the main screen into smaller, more visually digestible quantities.

Adjustable thumbnails: One tip for anyone wanting to sort through a lot of images is to maximize the thumbnail size so the screen effectively only displays one image at a time, as seen in this coastal seascape, then use the up/down arrows on the keyboard to scroll through the latest import while examining each file full size. Every time you find an image that you want to keep or think needs editing, you can classify it using the number keys to add one, two, three, four, or five stars (see the Organizing your work – ratings section later in this chapter). Use these to sort and search for images. (Pressing the number zero on the keypad removes all star attributes.) You can also see that once expanded to full screen, you can also type in a caption for the displayed image and play any associated sound (that is, if it's a movie clip). Even better, there are no restrictions as to how many albums you can create and, since they are essentially virtual folders, they don't take up much storage space.

As we expand our image and media collection, we'll not only need large capacity hard drives, but also data backups. It's important to perform backups in case the original drive corrupts, or suffers a mechanical failure. Nothing is forever and even though the drive might be a premium brand, things can still go wrong, usually when you least expect it.

There's no point in backing up images, or your Elements Catalog, to the place where the originals are also stored—typically your computer's hard drive. If it becomes corrupted, everything is lost. Consider a large-capacity hard drive that is used only for backing up your data: images, music, Elements' Catalog, and so on. Most PCs have room for additional internal drives. If you use a Mac, you'd be best to buy an external hard drive.

If you are using a Mac, backing up your data is easy using a pre-installed Apple application called Time Machine. Windows users also have it easy because most quality external drives (such as Seagate and Western Digital) come with automated backup software included.

This software takes only a few moments to set up. Once done, you can forget it, because it automatically backs all your new material up every hour, day, or week (depending on how you initially set up its preferences). Another viable option is to back up to the cloud. In many ways this is the most secure option as those companies spend an awful lot more on data security than any individual photographer! Some cloud storage companies worth a look include Dropbox, Backblaze, Google Drive, Apple, Box, and Microsoft OneDrive.

Above: Here's a standard desktop hard drive with a massive 8 TB storage capacity, of the type easily purchased online or from most good computer stores. It's perfect for all your media backup requirements.

Top left: For most of us the purchase of a desktop hard drive is the perfect solution for media backup. Devices are not expensive, come in a wide range of models and storage capacities, and if you fill one with your image files, it's easy enough to buy more to add to the library.

Left: The two screenshots here show Western Digital's free backup software (available for Mac and Windows) on the left, and Apple's excellent Time Machine software utility, which comes pre-loaded on every Mac, on the right.