Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual

Working with the Content and Favorites Palettes

In Elements 6, Adobe gives you a ton of stuff to use for customizing your projects, and a new palette just to hold it all: the Content palette. With Elements 6, you also get a Favorites palette, where you can keep the items you use most often from the Content palette (and from the Effects palette, too).

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT: About PSE Files

Anytime you create a multipage document in Elements, you get one file format choice when it's time to save—PSE. This special new format has both advantages and disadvantages.

When you create a PSE file, you actually create a folder containing a separate .psd file for each page (for each double-page spread for a Photo Book) and the PSE project file, which contains all the information Elements needs to reassemble your document the next time you open it. That's very handy when you're working in Elements, but the drawback is that hardly any other program can read these files. PSE files work just fine if you print at home or use Kodak EasyShare Gallery for online printing. You can send PSE files to EasyShare as easily as you send JPEGs.

The rub comes if you want to use a different printing service. If you make, say, a book that you want to print at Lulu.com or MyPublisher.com, there's no way they can work with your PSE file—at least not at this writing. Most printing services require PDF format files. Fortunately, there's a workaround.

You can open the individual PSD files for each page and save them as ...